The Parallel Communication and I/O Bandwidth Benchmarks: b_eff and b_eff_io

ABSTRACT:

We describe the design and MPI implementation of two benchmarks created to characterize the balanced system performance of high-performance clusters and supercomputers. We start with a communication-specific benchmark, called b_eff that characterizes the message passing performance of a system. Following the same line of development, we extend this work to the design and implementation of the effective I/O bandwidth benchmark (b_eff_io). Both of these benchmarks were developed on a Cray T3E-900 and have two goals:
a) to get a detailed insight into the performance strengths and weaknesses of different parallel communication and I/O patterns, and
b) to obtain a single bandwidth number that characterizes the average performance of the system namely processor communication for b_eff, and the I/O subsystem for b_eff_io.
Both benchmarks use a time-driven approach and loop over a variety of communication and access patterns to characterize a system in a fairly automated fashion. Results of the two benchmarks are given for several systems including IBM SPs, Cray T3E, NEC SX-5, and Hitachi SR 8000.

KEYWORDS:

MPI, Communication, Parallel I/O, Benchmarks, Bandwidth.

GLOBAL LINKS:

Full paper as reference, PDF document, postscript, gzip'ed postscript
Slides as reference, PDF document, postscript, gzip'ed postscript
The effective communication bandwidth benchmark b_eff
The effective file-I/O bandwidth benchmark b_eff_io
Information about MPI from the author
Information about MPI on T3E
Information about striped MPI-I/O on T3E