Performance Measurement and Trace Driven Simulation of Parallel CAD and Numeric Applications on a Hypercube Multicomputer

Abstract

This paper presents the performance evaluation, workload characterization, and trace driven simulation of a hypercube multicomputer running realistic workloads. Eleven representative parallel applications were selected as benchmarks. Software monitoring techniques were then used to collect execution traces. Based on the measurement results, we investigated both the computation and communication behavior of these parallel programs, including CPU utilization, computation task granularity, message interarrival distribution, the distribution of waiting times in receiving messages, and message length and destination distributions. We modeled the various time interval distributions by statistical functions which were verified by nonlinear regression technique using the empirical data. The temporal and spatial localities of message destinations were also studied. A model for the temporal locality of message length has been introduced and used to analyze the communication traces. A trace driven simulation environment, which uses the communication patterns of the parallel programs as inputs, was developed to study the behavior of the communication hardware under real workload. Simulation results on DMA and link utilizations are reported. © 1992 IEEE