SaPM: Switch-aware process mapping model for parallel computing

Abstract

The problem of assigning processes of a parallel program to processors of a parallel system, namely process mapping problem, has major impact on the resulting performance. The previous works only concern about the computation and communication cost, while ignoring the process switching cost. For a large-scale and communication-intensive application, more than one process may be placed onto a same processor. When the application is running, it will take long time to switch the processes. In this paper, we propose and introduce SwitchCAL, a method to calculate the process switching cost inside a processor, into the process mapping problem. Then we propose a switch-aware process mapping model - SaPM, and integrate the SaPM model with existing process mapping algorithm to obtain optimized process mapping scheme. The experiments show that our approach has high effectiveness.