Performance Measurement and Trace Driven Simulation of Parallel CAD and Numeric Applications on a Hypercube Multicomputer *

This paper presents the performance evaluation, workload characterization and trace driven simulation of a hypercube multicomputer running realistic workloads. Six representative parallel applications were selected as benchmarks. Software monitoring techniques were then used to collect execution traces. Based on the measurement results, we investigated both the computation and communication behavior of these parallel programs, including CPU utilization, computation task granularity, message interarrival distribution, the distribution of waiting times in receiving messages, and message length and destination distributions. The localities in communication were also studied. A trace driven simulation environment was developed to study the behavior of the communication hardware under real workload. Simulation results on DMA and link utilizations are reported. 1. INTRODUCTION Hypercube multicomputers have recently offered a cost-effective and feasible approach to supercomputing by connect..