Predicting slowdown for networked workstations

Most applications share the resources of networked workstations with other applications. Since system load can vary dramatically, allocation strategies that assume that resources have a constant availability and/or capability are unlikely to promote performance-efficient allocations in practice. In order to best allocate application tasks to machines, it is critical to provide a realistic model of the effects of contention on application performance. In this paper, we present a model that provides an estimate of the slowdown imposed by competing load on applications targeted to high-performance clusters and networks of workstations. The model provides a basis for predicting realistic communication and computation costs and is shown to achieve good accuracy for a set of scientific benchmarks commonly found in high-performance applications.