Modeling Contention Effects in Clustered Environments

Data-parallel applications executing in clustered environments share resources with other applications. Since system load can vary dramatically, it is critical to provide an accurate model of the effects of contention on application performance in order to provide realistic assessments of application behavior. In this paper, we present a model to predict contention effects in clustered environments. This model provides a basis for predicting realistic execution times for applications on clusters of workstations and is parameterized by the data allocation policy employed by the targeted application, the local slowdown present in each node of the cluster, and the relative weight associated with each node in the cluster. 1