Evaluation of Performance Prediction Method for Master/Slave Parallel Programs

摘要

This paper describes the design and implementation of a testbed for predicting master/slave (M/S) programs written using Message Passing Interface (MPI) programs. The testbed, named M/S Emulator (MSE), aims at assisting developers in evaluating the performance of M/S programs and dynamic load-balancing strategies on clusters of PCs. In order to realize this, MSE predicts the communication time by using a realistic parallel computational model, an extension of the LogGPS model. This extended model improves the prediction accuracy on a large number of processors, because it captures the master's bottleneck: the overhead required for retrieving arrival messages from the slaves. Current MSE also employs a best effort emulation method for predicting the calculation time. In our experiments, MSE demonstrated an accurate prediction on clusters, especially on a larger number of nodes. Therefore, we believe that our extended model enables us to analyze the scalability of the M/S program performance.