On the design and implementation of broadcast and global combine operations using the postal model

Abstract

There are several models that were proposed in recent years for message passing parallel systems. Examples are the postal model and its generalization the LogP model. In the postal model, a parameter λ is used to model the communication latency of the message passing system. In this paper, the gap between the theoritical modeling and the practical implementation is bridged. In particular, a number of practical issues related to the design and implementation of two collective communication operations, namely, the broadcast operation and the global marine operation is investigated. Results of the investigation are presented.