Modeling and Simulative Performance Analysis of SMP and Clustered Computer Architectures
The performance characteristics of several classes of parallel computing systems are analyzed and compared using high-fidelity modeling and execution-driven simulation. Processor, bus, and network models are used to construct and simulate the architectures of symmetric multiprocessors (SMPs), clusters of uniprocessors, and clusters of SMPs. To demonstrate a typical use of the models, the performance of ten systems with one to eight processors and the Scalable Coherent Interface interconnection network is evaluated using a parallel matrix-multiplication algorithm. Because the performance of a parallel algorithm on a specific architecture is dependent upon its communication-to-computation ratio, an analysis of communication latencies for bus transactions, cache coherence, and network transactions is used to quantify the communication overhead of each system. Due to the high fidelity of our models, these low-level performance statistics are more practically gathered than in testbed analyses yet more accurate than the results of purely analytical models. This level of detail gives the designer the ability to rapidly prototype and evaluate the performance of parallel and distributed computing systems.
View Entire Paper | Previous Page | White Papers Search
If you found this page useful, bookmark and share it on:
Embedded Star Newsletter
Don't have time to visit Embedded Star everyday? Then sign up for our free newsletter. We'll send you an email when we have something to share with you. Your email address will be kept confidential and we will not share, sell, or rent it to anyone. You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking a link in the email.
If you are familiar with RSS feeds, you can also sign up for our free blog feed. Our RSS feed is updated in real-time while our newsletter is updated daily.