Examining Anomalous Network Performance with Confidence

Variability in network performance is a major obstacle in effectively analyzing the throughput of modern high performance computer systems. High performance interconnection networks offer excellent best-case network latencies; however, highly parallel applications running on parallel machines typically require consistently high levels of performance to adequately leverage the massive amounts of available computing power. Performance analysts have usually quantified network performance using traditional summary statistics that assume the observational data is sampled from a normal distribution. In our examinations of network performance, we have found this method of analysis often provides too little data to understand anomalous network performance. In particular, we examine a multimodal performance scenario encountered with an Infiniband interconnection network and we explore the performance repeatability on the custom Cray SeaStar2 interconnection network after a set of software and driver updates.