Application Sensitivity to Network Characteristics
This work describes the results of a systematic study of the impact of
communication performance in a high performance cluster of workstations.
In addition to parallel programs, our more recent work examines
the sensitivity of NFS (version 2 and 3) performance to network parameters.
We develop an experimental system in which the communication latency,
overhead, and bandwidth can be independently varied to observe the
effects on applications. We show that in many contexts,
including fine-grained parallel programs, large scientific codes and
network filesystems, applications are most sensitive to overhead and
bandwidth. Surprisingly, many of our benchmark applications are
tolerant to increased network latency.
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