The Impact of Memory Hierarchies on Cluster Computing

Using off-the-shelf commodity workstations and PCs to build a cluster for parallel computing has become a common practice. A choice of a cost-effective cluster computing platform for a given budget and for certain types of application workloads is mainly determined by its memory hierarchy and interconnection network of the cluster. Finding such a solution from exhaustive simulations would be highly time-consuming and expensive; and predictions from measurements on existing clusters would be impractical. We present an analytical model for evaluating performance impact of memory hierarchies and networks on cluster computing. The model covers the memory hierarchy of a single SMP, a cluster of workstations/PCs, or a cluster of SMPs by changing various modeling and architectural parameters. Network variations covering bus and switch networks are also included in the analysis. Applications of different types are characterized by parameterized workloads with different computation and communi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: IPPS
• Authors: Xing Du, Xiaodong Zhang
• Keywords: Cluster Computing, Cost-effective Clusters, Distributed And Parallel Computing, IPPS 1999, Memory Hierarchy