Communication in parallel applications: characterization and sensitivity analysis

Communication characterization of parallel applications is essential to understand the interplay between architectures and applications in determining the maximum achievable performance. Although a significant amount of research has been conducted on execution-based architectural evaluations, very little effort has gone into capturing the communication behavior of an application mathematically. In this paper, we attempt to characterize the communication behavior of applications by temporal, spatial and volume attributes. We also study the impact of variation in application and architectural parameters on the communication behavior in terms of the three attributes. Our results show that for the chosen suite of applications, the message arrival and spatial distributions can be closely approximated by known statistical distributions and that the temporal as well as spatial distributions of all applications remain unchanged with respect to four parameters considered in this study. These results lead us closer to the belief that it is possible to abstract the communication properties of parallel applications in convenient mathematical forms that have wide applicability.