Hiding communication latency in reconfigurable message-passing environments

Communication overhead is one of the most important factors affecting the performance of message passing multicomputers. We present evidence (through the analysis of several parallel benchmarks) that there exists communications locality, and that this locality is "structured". We have devised a number of heuristics that can "predict" the target of subsequent communication requests. This technique, can be applied to reconfigurable interconnects to hide the communications latency by reconfiguring the interconnect concurrently to the computation. By comparing the inter-communication computation times of a number of parallel benchmarks with some specific reconfiguration times, we argue that the computation interval can be used to hide the concurrent reconfiguration of the interconnect, and present the performance enhancements of the proposed heuristics.