High Performance Computing

Assignment 2

In your textbook, a number of the questions at the end of Chapter 2 have to do with performance and evaluating communication time and potential work in latency hiding for a particular platform.  These questions (2-5 through 2-8) present some ideas about how to measure and separate the components of communication time, t_{startup} and t_{data}.

Armed with our knowledge of the behavioral semantics of the various flavors of MPI point to point communication as well as collective communication, and using the textbook questions as a guide, you are to generate a communications performance report.  This report should describe a set of experiments, designed by you, to evaluate the communications performance of both point-to-point and collective communication and computation available through latency hiding, for the set of MPI capable platforms we have access to, namely, the Olin 219 Network of Workstations (NOW), the 8-node Denison Beowulf cluster, and the OSC Itanium cluster.  The report should then present experimental data and assess/evaluate the results.  The programs developed should be an appendix for the report. 

This assignment is intentionally open ended and not fully specified.  Place yourself in the role of an experimental scientist instead of merely a student programmer, and ask yourself what are the important questions, and how can I build experiments to answer these questions.

You may work in teams of 2 on this assignment.