DHPC Technical Report DHPC-163

Analytical Models of Probability Distributions for MPI Point-to-Point Communication Times on Distributed Memory Parallel Computers

D.A. Grove and P.D. Coddington

Archived: 30 January 2006

Published in Proc. of 6th International Conference on Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing (ICA3PP-2005), Melbourne, Oct 2005, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 3719, pp 406-415, Springer, 2005.
© Copyright Springer.

Abstract

Measurement and modelling of distributions of data communication times is commonly done for telecommunication networks, but this has not previously been done for message passing communications on parallel computers. We have used the MPIBench program to measure distributions of point-to-point MPI communication times for two different parallel computers, with a low-end Ethernet network and a high-end Quadrics network respectively. Here we present and discuss the results of efforts to fit the measured distributions with standard probability distribution functions such as exponential, lognormal, Erlang, gamma, Pearson 5 and Weibull distributions.

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The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com.