This report compares the results of a set of benchmarks for measuring communication time on a number of NUMA computers ranging from a collection of workstations using PVM [5] to machines like the IBM SP-2 and the Cray T3D using their native communication library, MPI [4], or PVM. We are interested in the communication performance for a number of reasons. First, our main interest is to obtain fundamental parameters on a given hardware platform to help in building models of execution. Second to compare machines and help in evaluating new machines and architectures as they become available.
The following section describes the critical parameters in evaluating message passing systems. The techniques to measure these parameters are described. In section 3, the message passing performance of several multiprocessors and networks are presented. Communication and computational performance are contrasted. Section 4 provides details for obtaining the test software.