Refining the Communication Model for the Intel iPSC/2

Abstract

The communication model of a message-passing network must take into account interactions between concurrent communication operations in order to describe its behavior during high levels of communication activity. This work describes the results of measuring certain concurrent communication operations on an Intel ipSC/2-d4 hypercube. The operations measured set practical limits on the number and type of concurrent communication operations that can be supported by each node. These aspects of the iF'SC/2 communication network, along with measurements of bandwidth and latency given here and by others, constitute a communication model that can be used to describe the costs of intensive communication Operations, such as solutions to the broadcast and the scatter/gather problems.