Using Warp to Control Network Contention in Mermera
Files
Main report
Date
1993-06-04
DOI
Authors
Heddaya, Abdelsalam
Park, Kihong
Sinha, Himanshu
Version
OA Version
Citation
Heddaya, Abdelsalam; Park, Kihong; Sinha, Himanshu. "Using Warp to Control Network Contention in Mermera", Technical Report BUCS-1993-007, Computer Science Department, Boston University, June 1993. [Available from: http://hdl.handle.net/2144/1470]
Abstract
Parallel computing on a network of workstations can saturate the communication network, leading to excessive message delays and consequently poor application performance. We examine empirically the consequences of integrating a flow control protocol, called Warp control [Par93], into Mermera, a software shared memory system that supports parallel computing on distributed systems [HS93].
For an asynchronous iterative program that solves a system of linear equations, our measurements show that Warp succeeds in stabilizing the network's behavior even under high levels of contention. As a result, the application achieves a higher effective communication throughput, and a reduced completion time. In some cases, however, Warp control does not achieve the performance attainable by fixed size buffering when using a statically optimal buffer size.
Our use of Warp to regulate the allocation of network bandwidth emphasizes the possibility for integrating it with the allocation of other resources, such as CPU cycles and disk bandwidth, so as to optimize overall system throughput, and enable fully-shared execution of parallel programs.