Optimized communication patterns on workstation clusters

Pfenning, Jörg-Thomas and Moll, Christoph (1995) Optimized communication patterns on workstation clusters.
Published in: Parallel Computing Vol. 21 (3). pp. 373-388.

Abstract

The limited communication bandwidth and high startup latencies of clustered workstations restrict their use to problems with sparse communication patterns or good concurrency between calculation and communication. First we describe our modifications to the popular PVM message passing library, and report on performance improvements using the PVM package on an FDDI-ring. Applications developed with a parallel communications architecture in mind perform poorly when ported to a message passing library running on workstations with sequential communication. In the second part, we present a dynamic loop scheduling algorithm for the data parallel programming model which optimizes the network usage on such clusters. As a proof of concept we have implemented a basic matrix multiplication and find a significant increase in parallel efficiency.


Actions:
Download: [img] Postscript - Preprinted Version
Download (2MB) | Preview
Editorial actions: View Item View Item (Login required)
Content information:
Item Type: Article
Citations: 0 (Google Scholar) | 3 (Web of Science)
Uncontrolled Keywords: communication optimization dynamic loop scheduling algorithm FDDI message passing parallel efficiency PVM workstation cluster
Subjects:
  • 68-XX Computer science > 68Wxx Algorithms > 68W01 General

  • 68-XX Computer science > 68Mxx Computer system organization > 68M20 Performance evaluation; queueing; scheduling

  • 68-XX Computer science > 68Mxx Computer system organization > 68M10 Network design and communication

    		•
    Divisions: Mathematical Institute
    Related URLs:
    Deposit Information:
    ZAIK Number: zpr94-151
    Depositing User: Archive Admin
    Date Deposited: 02 Apr 2001 00:00
    Last Modified: 19 Jan 2012 10:54
    URI: http://e-archive.informatik.uni-koeln.de/id/eprint/151