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From: thomasf@ius3.ius.cs.cmu.edu (Thomas Fahringer)
Newsgroups: comp.parallel
Subject: Intel IPSC/860 performance ?
Message-ID: <1991Jun24.122022.19173@hubcap.clemson.edu>
Date: 24 Jun 91 09:59:12 GMT
Sender: fpst@hubcap.clemson.edu (Steve Stevenson)
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 45
Approved: parallel@hubcap.clemson.edu


I am parallelizing a couple of applications on the Intel IPSC/860.
Now I want to do some performance analysis and prediction.

For this reason I am desperately looking for some trustable performance
formulas and information about the Intel IPSC/860 for following purposes:

1. the time it takes to transfer a message of n (varying) bytes from a
   source to a destination node (single and multiple hops).

2. slow down factor of a transfer operation (according to point 1.) due
   to channel contention.

3. communication primitives behavior for different message sizes and
   different number of hops to go between source and destination node.

   I am mainly interested in following communication primitives:

        - blocking sequential (csend/creceive)
        - blocking full duplex (csend/creceive)
        - non-blocking receive, blocking send
        - blocking receive, non-blocking send
        - fully non-blocking

  Which communication primitive should I prefer ?

4. any formula describing the slow down behavior of an array access
   within a FORTRAN DO-loop induced by cache misses.
   I am interested in any kind of cache influnce in my computation on
   the IPSC/860.
   I am well aware of cache technology, but have no information about
   the Intel IPSC/860 cache architecture, strategies, etc.

5. Is there anyone out there who has measured performance of all the
   standard and intrinsic operations on the Intel IPSC/860 ?

6. Is there another bboard containing more information about the
   Intel IPSC/860 than this one.

7. If someone already collected a couple of IPSC 860 summaries, please
   forward them to me.

I post a summary if anyone requests.

Eternal thankful,

Tom