Sensitivity analysis of parallel applications to local and non-local interference

Abstract

The environment in which a parallel application is executed has high impact on the performance of the application due to interference caused by various factors in the execution environment. A detailed understanding of the sensitivity of the application to the parameters describing the execution environment can be of great help in (a) predicting a suitable target machine model for the application, (b) predicting its performance on the target machine, and (c) any algorithmic bottlenecks. In this paper, we analyze a suite of parallel applications for their sensitivity to local and non-local interference arising due to various factors in a parallel environment. We create a test bed consisting of five different parallel applications taken from different sources and analyze their sensitivity to single node and multi-node perturbations and show that parallel applications can behave very differently under different conditions of interference in the environment in which they are running. The main contributions of this paper are: (a) studying a suite of parallel algorithms for their sensitivity to local and non-local interference, (b) demonstrate that an application can behave differently to different interference levels in the environment, (c) demonstrate that the sensitivity of an application can be quantified as its absorption ratio at a given interference level. © 2007 Springer.