Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Benchmarking The Computation And Communication Performance Of The Cm-5, Kivanc Dincer, Zeki Bozkus, Sanjay Ranka, Geoffrey C. Fox

Northeast Parallel Architecture Center

Thinking Machines' CM-5 machine is a distributed-memory, message-passing computer. In this paper we devise a performance benchmark for the base and vector units and the data communication networks of the CM-5 machine. We model the communication characteristics such as communication latency and bandwidths of point-to-point and global communication primitives. We show, on a simple Gaussian elimination code, that an accurate static performance estimation of parallel algorithms is possible by using those basic machine properties connected with computation, vectorization, communication, and synchronization. Furthermore, we describe the embedding of meshes or hypercubes on the CM-5 fat-tree topology and illustrate the performance results …