A study of application sensitivity to variation in message passing latency and bandwidth

This study measures the effects of changes in message latency and bandwidth for production-level codes on a current generation tightly coupled MPP, the Intel Paragon. Messages are sent multiple times to study the application sensitivity to variations in band - width and latency. This method preserves the effects of contention on the interconnection network. Two applications are studied, PCTH, a shock physics code developed at Sandia National Laboratories, and PSTSWM, a spectral shallow water code developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory. These codes are significant in that PCTH is a {open_quote}full physics{close_quotes} application code in production use, while PSTSWM serves as a parallel algorithm test bed and benchmark for production codes used in atmospheric modeling. They are also significant in that the message-passing behavior differs significantly between the two codes, each representing an important class of scientific message-passing applications