A Novel Process Mapping Strategy in Clustered Environments

Abstract

Nowadays the number of available processing cores within computing nodes which are used in recent clustered environments, are growing up with a rapid rate. Despite this trend, the number of available network interfaces in such computing nodes has almost been remained unchanged. This issue can lead to high usage of network interface in many workloads, especially in heavy-communicating workloads. As a result, network interface may raise as a performance bottleneck and can drastically degrade the performance. The goal of this paper is to introduce a new process mapping strategy in multi-core clusters aimed at reducing network interface contention and improving inter-node communication performance of parallel applications. Performance evaluation of the new mapping algorithm in synthetic and real workloads indicates that the new strategy can achieve 5% to 90% performance improvement in heavy communicating workloads, compared to other well-known methods.