Network Reconfiguration Suitability for Scientific Applications

Abstract

This paper analyzes the communication pattern of several scientific applications and how they can make profit of network reconfiguration in order to adapt network topology to the communication needs so that total execution time is reduced. By using an analysis methodology based on real application executions, we study the variation of the required communication bandwidth with time and also the global interprocedural communication patterns. Results show that required bandwidth between each pair of processes does not significantly fluctuates, leading to a constant use of the links and therefore discouraging dynamic reconfigurations of the network during execution time. Nevertheless, the group of busy links changes with each application showing a different communication graph for each of them. Thus, execution time may be accelerated by using an ad-hoc topology, that is, reconfiguring the network before the execution of the application in order to adapt it to the application needs.