A preliminary analysis of the MPI queue characterisitics of several applications

Understanding the message passing behavior and network resource usage of distributed-memory message-passing parallel applications is critical to achieving high performance and scalability. While much research has focused on how applications use critical compute related resources, relatively little attention has been devoted to characterizing the usage of network resources, specifically those needed by the network interface. This paper discusses the importance of understanding network interface resource usage requirements for parallel applications and describes an initial attempt to gather network resource usage data for several real-world codes. The results show widely varying usage patterns between processes in the same parallel job and indicate that resource requirements can change dramatically as process counts increase and input data changes. This suggests that general network resource management strategies may not be widely applicable, and that adaptive strategies or more fine-grained controls may be necessary for environments where network interface resources are severely constrained.