Programming Research Group
Technical Report TR-4-96
The theory, practice, and a tool for BSP performance
prediction applied to a CFD application
Jonathan M D Hill,
Paul I Crumpton and
David A Burgess
February 1996, 17pp.
The Bulk Synchronous Parallel (BSP)
model provides a theoretical framework to accurately predict the
execution time of parallel programs. In this paper we describe a
BSP programming library that has
been developed, and contrast two approaches to analysing performance:
- a pencil and paper method with a theoretical cost model;
- a profiling tool that analyses trace information generated during
program execution.
These approaches are evaluated on an industrial application code that
solves fluid dynamics equations around a complex aircraft geometry on
an IBM SP2 and SGI PowerChallenge. We show how the tool can be used to
explore the communication patterns of the CFD code and accurately
predict the performance of the application on any parallel machine.
This work was performed within
Oxford Parallel
with financial support from Rolls Royce plc and EPSRC.
This paper is also available as
Numerical Analysis Group
research report
NA-96/03
and has been submitted to EuroPar'96.
It is available as a 373,089 byte
gzipped PostScript file.