The Impact of Communication Style on Machine Resource Usage for the iWarp Parallel Processor
Abstract
Programs executing on a private-memory parallel system exchange data by explicitly sending and receiving messages. Two communication styles have been identified for such systems: memory communication (each message exchanged between two processors is buffered in memory, e.g. as in message passing) and systolic communication (each word of a message is transmitted directly from the sender processor to receiver processor, without any buffering in memory). The Warp system supports both communication styles and therefore provides a platform that allows us to evaluate how the choice of communication style impacts the usage of processor resources. Parallel program generators map a machine independent description of a computation onto a private-memory parallel system. We use two different parallel program generators that employ the two communication styles to map a set of application kernels onto iWarp. By using tools to generate the parallel programs, we are able to obtain realistic data on the execution of programs using the different communication styles. 'Mis paper reports on measurements of instruction format usage, the utilization of the communication ports (gates), and instruction frequencies on the iWarp system. It is a first step towards understanding how features and capabilities of parallel processors are actually used by parallel programs that have been mapped automatically.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Nov 01, 1992
- Accession Number
- ADA262425
Entities
People
- A. Hasegawa
- D. O'hallaron
- S. Hinrichs
- T. Stricker
- T.E. Gross
Organizations
- Carnegie Mellon University