On Input/Output Speedup in Tightly Coupled Multiprocessors

Previous models of program speedup on parallel architectures tend to ignore I/O activity and other important issues. In this paper we derive analytic speedup models including I/O activities. We show that ignoring I/O yields conservative speedup results. We explore the effectiveness of using hardware format conversion units in multiprocessors [33]. We prove that hardware parallel format conversion loses its edge over software parallel format conversion if the ratio of the number of processors to I/O bandwidth increases. For a given number of processors, program speedup is more sensitive to the available I/O bandwidth rather than the format conversion speed. Ninety-one Fortran programs are used in various experiments to verify our models and conclusions. Most of the programs are I/O bound. Our empirical results show that including I/O activity improves the speedup factor for 78 percent of the programs, and 18 percent of the programs are sped up only due to faster I/O activities. For a serial machine, using hardware format conversion units designed in [13] reduces program execution time by an average factor of three. The software format conversion speed used is obtained from direct measurements on an IBM 4341 running CMS and a CDC Cyber 175 running NOS. For multiprocessor systems a factor of eight increase in the processors to I/O bandwidth ratio reduces the effectiveness of hardware format conversion to an average factor of 1.36.