Reproducible Measurements of MPI Performance Characteristics

In this paper we describe the difficulties inherent in making accurate, reproducible measurements of message-passing performance. We describe some of the mistakes often made in attempting such measurements and the consequences of such mistakes. We describe mpptest, a suite of performance measurement programs developed at Argonne National Laboratory, that attempts to avoid such mistakes and obtain reproducible measures of MPI performance that can be useful to both MPI implementors and MPI application writers. We include a number of illustrative examples of its use.