Abstract

Parallel computing is becoming increasingly accessible through advancement in microprocessors and networking technologies. It is found that the performances of the clusters do not match with their promises, although they are built on the most advanced components. Much effort has been devoted to address the software overhead problem in the past, which is known as the major hindrance in achieving high performance. This thesis shows that having a low-latency communication system does not guarantee high performance, as there are other communication issues that have not been addressed by the use of low-latency communication, such as contention, communication patterns and scheduling of communication events. The development of an efficient parallel application depends upon a realistic prediction of application behavior and the ability to explain the performance characteristics of an application on a parallel system; this requires in-depth understanding of both the application and the architecture characteristics. This dissertation proposes the use of a realistic communication model to guide the performance understanding and the algorithm design processes, which are the keys to

Citations