1994 International Conference on Parallel Processing Experimental Validation of Stochastic Performance Models of General Layered Task Systems
Athar B. Tayyab Jo, G. Kuhl · 1994
1. ABSTRACT Performance analysis of synchronization mechanisms for simple layered task systems has recently been reported. In this paper, we develop and validate performance models for general layered task systems which are applicable to a wider range of synchronization mechanisms and parallel task systems. Synchronization mechanisms considered in clude both strong (barrier) synchronization and weak (partial) synchronization. The models explicitly consider overheads due to synchronization waiting time and con tention for shared software and hardware resources. The models are solvable for a number of commonly used task computation time distributions and are experimentally vali dated on two different shared-memory multiprocessors. It is shown that the task computation behavior, the amount of intertask dependencies, synchronization overheads, and throughput of the processor-memory interconnection net work interact in a multi-dimensional, but predictable, way to impact overall performance. Approximate and asymp totic models are used to demonstrate these relationships, in both qualitative and quantitative terms.