Performance Measurement and Support Software for the Message-Driven Model on Multiprocessors

It is important to study the characteristics of parallel applications in order to evaluate their impact on the architecture of multiprocessors and multicomputers, and their software support. We propose to evaluate some aspects of the usefulness of the message-driven model of computation for parallel programming. For certain scientific SPMD programs that exhibit a substantial amount of idle time, it will be shown that message-driven programming can help reduce idle time and increase speedup with minimal compiler support. Specifically, the message-driven model of computation will be shown to be an effective trade-off between full context-switched threading and no threading support. Message-driven code has been shown to be useful to program irregular, unstructured applications. This dissertation will use the ProperCAD II library as a testbed to analyze six large applications, and demonstrate the usefulness of some tools for parallel programming, developed with the message-driven model in mind. This dissertation reports on a detailed evaluation of message-driven parallel programs on two classes of parallel architectures, a shared-memory multiprocessor and a message-passing multicomputer. The parallelism structure, the communication characteristics, locality characteristics, grain sizes of computations, and detailed measurements of system time, idle time, and user time in these applications are examined in detail. Various problem sizes and system sizes are examined. After thorough examination of the codes, a case study of a specific application is done, and the application is optimized with the help of the tools and analysis presented in this dissertation.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Electrical Engineering

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2015

Author dc:creator

• Holm, John Gustaf

Contributors dc:contributor

• Banerjee, Prithviraj

• Engineering, Electronics and Electrical

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

(MiAaPQ)AAI9737131

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/81184