A Realistic Cost Model for the Communication Time in Parallel Programs

In this paper we develop a model for communication time on parallel computers consisting of processors and a service network, i.e., a network performing services like broadcast, synchronization, and global variables. The implementation of the service network is done on a free configurable Transputer network. Our cost model describes the communication time of accesses to global variables and consists of a multi-linear function. The cost model includes the parameters packet size, send hot spot, and the number of processors accessing global variables. These parameters influence the communication time in a high degree and capture important parameters like contention. We implement a Bitonic Sort and a Connected Components algorithm (among others) and we show that our model is able to predict the communication time within a 10% error if indirect service networks are used. The applications show that it is easy for a programmer to determine the parameter values for our model and that our new cost model precisely predicts the communication time of parallel algorithms. Furthermore, we minimize the communication time of accesses to global variables by finding a balance between the number of messages in the network and their size. Our model predicts the optimal values for these parameters which we validate by experiments. A modified implementation of our routing which determines on-line the optimal parameter values for an access to a global variable achieves good speed ups.