A new process placement algorithm in multi-core clusters aimed to reducing network interface contention

Abstract

The number of processing cores within computing nodes which are used in current clustered systems, are growing up rapidly. Despite this trend, the number of available network interfaces in such nodes almost has been remained unchanged. This issue can lead to high usage of network interface in many workloads, especially in workloads which have high inter-process communications. As a result, network interface would become a performance bottleneck and can degrade the performance drastically. The goal of this paper is to introduce a new process mapping algorithm in multi-core clusters aimed to reducing network interface contention and improving the performance of running parallel applications. Comparison of the new algorithm with other well-known methods in synthetic and real workloads indicates that the new strategy can gain 5% to 90% performance improvement in heavy communicating workloads. © 2012 Springer-Verlag GmbH.