Benchmark evaluation of the message-passing overhead on modern parallel architectures

The paper presented was inspired by an interesting investigation about the performance of MPI on an IBM RS/6000 SP machine [I]. The authors proposed a model for the evaluation of message-passing overhead and suggested to have an evaluation of message-passing performance on as many hardware platforms as possible. In some further investigations such evaluation was extended to other parallel platforms [2], [4], [5], [7], [9]. However, besides some restricted investigations [8] most recently presented MPP hardware platforms were left out in these investigations. Following the idea of [1] the paper presented analyzes performance of MPI on various most-recent-hardware platforms with respect to communication patterns used in parallel simulation software. This explicitly includes collective communication, especially across all processors used by the application, because it is often used in parallel simulation packages.