Comparison of Message Aggregation Strategies for Parallel Simulations on a High Performance Cluster

Cong-Duc Pham (1)

1 LIUPPA - Laboratoire Informatique de l'Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour

Parallel simulations of fine grain applications usually generate a large amount of messages. The overhead for sending these messages over an interconnection network can dramatically limit the speedup of a parallel simulation. In this case, message aggregation techniques can increase the granularity of the application and reduce the communication overhead. This paper compares sender-initiated and receiver-initiated message aggregation strategies and addresses their performance when applied to parallel simulations of high-speed communication network models on a high performance cluster. Receiver-initiated strategies were initially motivated by the cyclic behavior of the parallel simulation kernel and by the capabilities of the test-bed environment to handle large messages up to 2000 bytes with small overheads.

Domains: Computer Science [cs]

Cong-Duc Pham. Comparison of Message Aggregation Strategies for Parallel Simulations on a High Performance Cluster. Proceedings - IEEE Computer Society's Annual International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunications Systems, MASCOTS, 2000, Washington, DC, USA, Unknown Region. pp.358-365, ⟨10.1109/MASCOT.2000.876559⟩. ⟨hal-01912909⟩