Performance Prediction and Evaluation of Parallel Processing on a NUMA Multiprocessor

Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) architectures make it possible to build large-scale shared memory multiprocessor systems in comparison with non-scalable Uniform Memory Access (UMA) architectures. Most NUMA multiprocessor operations such as scheduling and synchronizing processes, accessing data from processors to memory models and allocating distributed memory space to different processors, are performed through interconnection networks such as a multistage switching network. The efficiency of these basic operations determines the parallel processing performance on a NUMA multiprocessor. This paper presents several analytical models to predict and evaluate the overhead of interprocessor communication, process scheduling, process synchronization and remote memory access where network contention and memory contention are considered. Performance measurements to support the models and analyses through several numerical examples have been done on the BBN GP1000, a NUMA shared memory multipr..