Estimation of MPI Application Performance on Volunteer Environments

Emerging MPI libraries, such as VolpexMPI and P2P MPI, allow message passing parallel programs to execute effectively in heterogeneous volunteer environments despite frequent failures. However, the performance of message passing codes varies widely in a volunteer environment, depending on the application characteristics and the computation and communication characteristics of the nodes and the interconnection network. This paper has the dual goal of developing and validating a tool chain to estimate performance of MPI codes in a volunteer environment and analyzing the suitability of the class of computations represented by NAS benchmarks for volunteer computing. The framework is deployed to estimate performance in a variety of possible volunteer configurations, including some based on the measured parameters of a campus volunteer pool. The results show slowdowns by factors between 2 and 10 for different NAS benchmark codes for execution on a realistic volunteer campus pool as compared to dedicated clusters.