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ISCA
1997
IEEE

Effects of Communication Latency, Overhead, and Bandwidth in a Cluster Architecture

13 years 8 months ago
Effects of Communication Latency, Overhead, and Bandwidth in a Cluster Architecture
This work provides a systematic study of the impact of communication performance on parallelapplications in a high performance network of workstations. We develop an experimental system in which the communication latency, overhead, and bandwidth can be independently varied to observe the effects on a wide range of applications. Our results indicate that current efforts to improve cluster communication performance to that of tightly integrated parallel machines results in significantly improved application performance. We show that applications demonstrate strong sensitivity to overhead, slowing down by a factor of 60 on 32 processors when overhead is increased from 3 to 103 s. Applications in this study are also sensitive to per-message bandwidth, but are surprisingly tolerant of increased latency and lower per-byte bandwidth. Finally, most applications demonstrate a highly linear dependence to both overhead and per-message bandwidth, indicating that further improvements in communic...
Richard P. Martin, Amin Vahdat, David E. Culler, T
Added 06 Aug 2010
Updated 06 Aug 2010
Type Conference
Year 1997
Where ISCA
Authors Richard P. Martin, Amin Vahdat, David E. Culler, Thomas E. Anderson
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