Title
Evaluating the communication performance of MPPs using synthetic sparse matrix multiplication workloads
Abstract
Communication has a dominant impact on the performance of massively parallel processors (MPPs). We propose a methodology to evaluate the internode communication performance of MPPs using a controlled set of synthetic workloads. By generating a range of sparse matrices and measuring the performance of a simple parallel algorithm that repeatedly multiplies a sparse matrix by a dense vector, we can determine the relative performance of different communication workloads. Specifiable communication parameters include the number of nodes, the average amount of communication per node, the degree of sharing among the nodes, and the computation-communication ratio. We describe a general procedure for constructing sparse matrices that have these desired communication and computation parameters, and apply a range of these synthetic workloads to evaluate the hierarchical ring interconnection and cache-only memory architecture (COMA) of the Kendall Square Research KSRI MPP. This analysis discusses the impact of the KSRI architecture on communication performance, highlighting the utility and impact of the automatic update feature. It also investigates the impact of system contention on the performance, particularly how it causes potential updates to be ignored.
Year
DOI
Venue
1993
10.1145/165939.165974
International Conference on Supercomputing 2006
Keywords
Field
DocType
synthetic sparse matrix multiplication,dominant impact,different communication workloads,ksri architecture,specifiable communication parameter,sparse matrix,relative performance,communication performance,internode communication performance,synthetic workloads,kendall square research ksri,cache only memory architecture,parallel algorithm,sparse matrices
Computer science,Massively parallel,Parallel algorithm,Parallel computing,Sparse matrix multiplication,Interconnection,Memory architecture,Sparse matrix,Computation
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
0-89791-600-X
11
2.27
References 
Authors
17
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Eric L. Boyd112415.97
John-David Wellman234436.97
Santosh G. Abraham3762124.08
Edward S. Davidson4922171.30