Performance characterisation of intra-cluster collective communications

Abstract

Although recent works try to improve collective communication in grid systems by separating intra and inter-cluster communication, the optimisation of communications focus only on inter-cluster communications. We believe, instead, that the overall performance of the application may be improved if intra-cluster collective communications performance is known in advance. Hence, it is important to have an accurate model of the intra-cluster collective communications, which provides the necessary evidences to tune and to predict their performance correctly. In this paper we present our experience on modelling such communication strategies. We describe and compare different implementation strategies with their communication models, evaluating the models' accuracy and describing the practical challenges that can be found when modelling collective communications.