Parallel programs and background load: efficiency studies with the PAR-Bench system
ICS '91 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Supercomputing
Performance prediction and tuning on a multiprocessor
ISCA '91 Proceedings of the 18th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Evaluating performance of prefetching second level caches
ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review
Parallelism in a multi-user environment
Parallel Computing
On the value of preemption in scheduling
APPROX'06/RANDOM'06 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Approximation Algorithms for Combinatorial Optimization Problems, and 10th international conference on Randomization and Computation
SWAT'12 Proceedings of the 13th Scandinavian conference on Algorithm Theory
Journal of Scheduling
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In this paper, performance degradation specifically due to the multiprogramming (MP) overhead in a parallel execution environment is quantified. In addition, total system overhead is also measured. A methodology, which estimates the MP overhead present in real workloads, is illustrated with real measurements taken on an Alliant FX/80 running Xylem (Cedar's operating system). It is found that MP overhead usually consumes between 10% and 23% of the processing power available to parallel programs. Total system overhead usually consumes between 12% and 30% of the parallel environment processing power, but is found to be as high as 82.1%. The mean MP overhead is determined to be 16% which is well over half the total system overhead executed on the system (the mean system overhead is determined to be 24% of the processing power). It is found that MP overhead, total system overhead, and application completion time are all moderately correlated. Relationships between the characteristics of a workload and the overhead measurements indicate that processor utilization and to a lesser degree paging are moderately correlated with the overhead present in the workload. It is also found that MP overhead is statistically independent of the number of parallel jobs in the system, while total system overhead is not.