Realistic evaluation of interconnection network performance at high loads

Abstract

Any simulation-based evaluation of an interconnection network proposal requires a good characterization of the workload. Synthetic traffic patterns based on independent traffic sources are commonly used to measure performance in terms of average latency and peak throughput. As they do not capture the level of self-throttling that occurs in most parallel applications, they can produce inaccurate throughput estimates at high loads. Thus, workloads that resemble the varying levels of synchronization of actual applications are needed to study the performance of interconnection networks. One approach is to use simple, burst-synchronized synthetic workloads that emulate the self-throttling of many parallel applications. To validate this approach, we compare the gains achieved by a restrictive injection mechanism under this workload with those obtained using traces from the NAS Parallel Benchmarks. This study confirms that the burst-synchronized traffic model provides reasonable performance estimates, which could be improved by taking into account dependency chains between messages.