The Memory logP Model of Local Communication

1 Abstract—Data movement across a memory hierarchy can severely impact application execution time. For example, on the fast interconnect of the Origin 2000 three-and four-fold increases in communication cost for small message transmissions (~1K) stored non-contiguously are not uncommon. Simple, accurate predictions of communication time in hierarchical memories will identify bottlenecks in communication performance during algorithm design. We present a simple and useful model of point-to-point memory communication inspired by LogP to predict and analyze the latency of memory copy, pack and unpack for varying memory access patterns. We use our model to isolate the contributions of hardware, middleware, and software to data transfers on Intel-and MIPS-based platforms.