EVALUATION OF MULTIPROCESSOR INTERCONNECTION NETWORKS
Technical Report CSG-38-98
F.W. Howell & R.N. Ibbett
Department of Computer Science
University of Edinburgh
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.
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.
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
