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. While low-level performance attributes are difficult to measure on experimental testbed systems, and are far less accurate from purely analytical models, with high-fidelity simulative models they can be readily and accurately obtained. This level of detail gives the designer the ability to rapidly prototype and evaluate the performance of parallel and distributed computing systems.