EVALUATION OF MULTIPROCESSOR INTERCONNECTION NETWORKS

Technical Report CSG-38-98

F.W. Howell & R.N. Ibbett
Department of Computer Science
University of EdinburghK

Contents

Introduction

The EMIN project has involved setting up a testbed for simulating multiprocessor networks. All levels from low level hardware to the software interfaces affect performance, and so the initial simulation testbed provided an MPI interface on top of a cycle level simulator. The networks modelled included a crossbar and the Cray T3D network. Meaningful simulations at this level of detail proved infeasible, however, and an alternative approach was to use microbenchmarking, of both shared memory and message passing network primitives, as a means of characterising network performance in a way which is meaningful to programmers. This led to a refined simulation testbed which cleanly separates workload models from network models, using an interface based on the microbenchmarking work. In a further development, a web version of the testbed was developed and the value of this approach to modelling is evaluated, in particular the accessibility of the simulation models and the importance of visualisation.

A postscript version of this report is available as ECS-CSG-38-98. This HTML version includes the applets for some of the simjava models. These require a web browser supporting Java 1.1. They have been tested on Sun's hotjava browser and Netscape's communicator version 4.04 preview release 2.

The report contains the following sections (which will become available shortly):


Fred Howell
Computer Systems Group
Department of Computer Science
The University of Edinburgh
King's Buildings
Edinburgh EH9 3JZ

Last modified: Mon July 13 1998