Aggressive Communication Optimizations for Clusters of Workstations

Abstract

Because of the increasing computational power of workstations and the PCs, the peak processing power of clusters of workstations has been increasing at a rapid pace. However, the sustained performance on a variety of applications lags far behind, because these systems offer lower communication performance. In this paper, we focus on improving the communication performance of the applications run on the clusters through aggressive compiler optimizations. We present a general interprocedural technique for performing communication optimizations across procedure boundaries. Our technique uses the result of local analysis to model the communication as a communication loop, and then performs flow-sensitive interprocedural data-flow analysis to avoid redundant communication, and to perform communication aggregation. Our experimental results and the projected analysis on the clusters shows that aggressive communication optimizations from compilers are very important for system with low communication performance and high computational power.