TITLE = Communication Pattern Based Node Selection for Shared Networks

AUTHORS = Srikanth Goteti and Jaspal Subhlok

ABSTRACT

Selection of the most suitable nodes on a network to execute a parallel application requires
 matching the network status to the application requirements. We propose and validate a novel 
two step approach that exploits the knowledge of the communication structure of the application 
to address this problem. In the first step, a small set of candidate node groups are selected as
potential sites of application execution, by analyzing the network status information and the 
communication patterns used by the application. The second step is based on the concept of a 
communication skeleton, which is a short running program that generates the dominant 
communication operations of the application it represents. The communication skeleton is 
executed on all candidate groups of nodes.The node group selected for application execution is 
the one that achieves the best performance on the communication skeleton. This approach leads to
customized node selection and is particularly well suited to situations where available network
information is of poor quality or expected communication performance cannot be modeled 
accurately. We  motivate this approach, describe a prototype implementation, and present 
performance results for NAS Parallel Benchmarks executing on a shared network testbed.