Characterization of message-passing overhead on the AP3000 multicomputer

The performance of the communication primitives of parallel computers is critical for the overall system performance. The characterization of the communication overhead is very important to estimate the global performance of parallel applications and to detect possible bottlenecks. In this paper, we evaluate, model and compare the performance of the message-passing libraries provided by the Fujitsu AP3000 multicomputer: MPI/AP, PVM/AP and APlib. Our aim is to fairly characterize the communication primitives using general models and performance metrics.