Synthesizing Network Requirements Using Parallel Scientific Applications
Anand Sivasubramaniam, Aman Singla, Umakishore Ramachandran, H. Venkateswaran · 1994
We synthesize the link bandwidth requirement for a binary hypercubetopology using a set of five scientific applications. We use an execution-driven simulator called SPASM to collect data points for system sizes that are feasible to be simulated. These data points are then used in a regression analysis for projecting the link bandwidth requirements for larger systems. These requirements are projected as a function of the following system parameters: number of processors, CPU clock speed, and problem size. These results are also used to project the link bandwidths for other network topologies. A significant contribution of our study is in quantifying the link bandwidth that has to be made available to tolerate a given amount of network overhead in an application. Our results show that typical link bandwidths (200-300 MBytes/sec) found in current commercial parallel architectures (such as Intel Paragon and Cray T3D) would have fairly low network overhead for the scientific applications co...