The Parallel Communication and I/O Bandwidth Benchmarks: b_eff and b_eff_io

Rolf Rabenseifner
High-Performance Computing-Center Stuttgart (HLRS)
Rechenzentrum Universität Stuttgart (RUS)
University of Stuttgart
Allmandring 30
D-70550 Stuttgart
Germany
rabenseifner@rus.uni-stuttgart.de
rabenseifner@hlrs.de
http://www.hlrs.de/people/rabenseifner/

Alice E. Koniges
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)
Livermore, CA 94550
USA
koniges@llnl.gov
http://www.rzg.mpg.de/~ack

ABSTRACT:
We describe the design and MPI implementation of two benchmarks created to characterize the balanced system performance of high-performance clusters and supercomputers. We start with a communication-specific benchmark, called b_eff that characterizes the message passing performance of a system. Following the same line of development, we extend this work to the design and implementation of the effective I/O bandwidth benchmark (b_eff_io). Both of these benchmarks were developed on a Cray T3E-900 and have two goals:
a) to get a detailed insight into the performance strengths and weaknesses of different parallel communication and I/O patterns, and
b) to obtain a single bandwidth number that characterizes the average performance of the system namely processor communication for b_eff, and the I/O subsystem for b_eff_io.
Both benchmarks use a time-driven approach and loop over a variety of communication and access patterns to characterize a system in a fairly automated fashion. Results of the two benchmarks are given for several systems including IBM SPs, Cray T3E, NEC SX-5, and Hitachi SR 8000.

KEYWORDS:
MPI, Communication, Parallel I/O, Benchmarks, Bandwidth.

LOCAL LINKS:
Full paper as PDF document, postscript, gzip'ed postscript
Slides as PDF document, postscript, gzip'ed postscript

GLOBAL LINKS:
Full paper as reference, PDF document, postscript, gzip'ed postscript
Slides as reference, PDF document, postscript, gzip'ed postscript
The effective communication bandwidth benchmark b_eff
The effective file-I/O bandwidth benchmark b_eff_io
Information about MPI from the author
Information about MPI on T3E
Information about striped MPI-I/O on T3E