Affiliations: Distributed Systems Technology Center (DSTC), Monash
University Caulfield Campus, 900 Dandenong Road, Caulfield East, VIC 3145,
Australia. E-mail: reussner@acm.org | Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik,
Stuhlsatzenhausweg 85, D-66123 Saarbrücken, Germany. E-mail:
sanders@mpi-sb.mpg.de | C&C; Research Laboratories, NEC Europe, Rathausallee
10, D-53757 Sankt Augustin, Germany. E-mail: traff@ccrl-nece.de
Note: [] The work described in this paper was done while this author was
at Lehrstuhl Informatik für Ingenieure und Naturwissenschaftler,
Universität Karlsruhe, Germany
Abstract: The main objective of the MPI communication library is to enable
{\it portable parallel programming} with high performance within the
message-passing paradigm. Since the MPI standard has no associated performance
model, and makes no performance guarantees, comprehensive, detailed and
accurate performance figures for different hardware platforms and MPI
implementations are important for the application programmer, both for
understanding and possibly improving the behavior of a given program on a given
platform, as well as for assuring a degree of predictable behavior when
switching to another hardware platform and/or MPI implementation. We term this
latter goal {\it performance portability}, and address the problem of attaining
performance portability by benchmarking. We describe the SKaMPI benchmark which
covers a large fraction of MPI, and incorporates well-accepted mechanisms for
ensuring accuracy and reliability. SKaMPI is distinguished among other MPI
benchmarks by an effort to maintain a public performance database with
performance data from different hardware platforms and MPI implementations.
