Evaluation of Early Systems -- recent results
Evaluation of Early Systems -- recent results
Latency and Bandwidth Measurements
Message passing performance is usually measured in units of time or bandwidth (bytes per second). In this study, we chose time as the measure of performance for sending a small message. The time for a small, or zero length, message is usually bounded by the speed of the signal through the media (latency) and any software overhead in sending/receiving the message. Small message times are important in synchronization and determining optimal granularity of parallelism. For large messages, bandwidth is the bounded metric, usually approaching the maximum bandwidth of the media. Choosing two numbers to represent the performance of a network can be misleading, so the reader is encouraged to plot communication time as function of message length to compare and understand the behavior of message passing systems.
As part of our benchmarking research over the last ten years, we have measured latency and bandwidth over most multiprocessors and local area networks. The following figure illustrates the relative communication performance of various message-passing systems.
Evaluation of Early Systems Project