Memory hierarchy on multi-core clusters has two-fold characteristics: vertical memory hierarchy and horizontal memory hierarchy. Vertical memory hierarchy has been modeled by previous work (e.g. memory logP, lognP, log3P etc.) to analyze middleware’s effects on point-to-point communication with different message sizes and message strides; Horizontal memory hierarchy has become more prominent due to distinct performance among three levels of communication in a multi-core cluster: intra-CMP, inter-CMP and inter-node, which should adequately be considered. Derived from lognP and log3P models, new analytical models mlognP and its reduction 2log{2,3}P are proposed to unitedly abstract memory hierarchy on multi-core clusters in vertical and horizontal levels. The results of performance evaluation show that it is indispensable to incorporate horizontal memory hierarchy into new models suitable for multi-core clusters, and 2log{2,3}P model can predict communication costs for message passing on multi-core clusters more accurately than log3P model.
['Bibo Tu', 'Jianping Fan', 'Jianfeng Zhan', 'Xiaofang Zhao']
Accurate Analytical Models for Message Passing on Multi-core Clusters