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Synthetic workload generation for parallel processing systems

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1127))

Abstract

In the performance evaluation for parallel systems, modeling and generating the workload (i.e. the (set of) programs) is one of the most important and crucial tasks. While benchmarks are frequently used to characterize the real workload in measurement studies, they often fail to adequately describe the real workload, that the analyst has in mind. What is needed is a support for generating synthetic workloads which are on the one hand able to characterize the real workload at the desired level of detail and which are on the other hand easy to construct.

In this paper we describe a tool which has been designed and implemented with respect to these demands. The basic idea is to provide a set of communication patterns (e.g. one-to-one, one-to-all) and computation patterns (“tasks”), which are the building blocks of the synthetic program. By “putting” these blocks together, the analyst can create the desired algorithmic structure. This skeleton is the input to an analysis and simulation tool (N-MAP) [Fers 95a]. Within this environment, various quantitative parameters describing the duration of computations and communications can be specified. The “execution” of the skeleton is then simulated based on the provided parameter values.

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László Böszörményi

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© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Pfneiszl, H., Kotsis, G. (1996). Synthetic workload generation for parallel processing systems. In: Böszörményi, L. (eds) Parallel Computation. ACPC 1996. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1127. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-61695-0_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-61695-0_12

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-61695-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-70645-8

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