Modeling the Effects of Contention on the Performance of Heterogeneous Applications Silvia

Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works, must be obtained from the IEEE. Abstract Fast networks have made it possible to coordinate distributed heterogeneous CPU, memory, and storage resources to provide a powerful platform for executing high-performance applications. However, the performance of these applications on such systems is highly dependent on the allocation and efficient coordination of application tasks. A key component for a performance-efficient allocation strategy is a predictive model which provides a realistic estimate of application performance under varying resource loads. In this paper, we present a model for predicting the effects of contention on application behavior in heterogeneous systems. In particular, our model calculates the slowdown imposed on communication and computation for non-dedicated two-machine heterogeneous platforms. We describe the model for the Sun/CM2 and Sun/Paragon coupled heterogeneous systems. We present experiments on production systems with emulated contention which show the predicted communication and computation costs to be within 15% on average of actual costs.