Identifying the capability of overlapping computation with communication

Overlapping computation with communication is central to obtaining high performance on distributed-memory multiprocessors. This report explicates the overlapping capability of two distributed-memory multiprocessors: the EM-X and IBM SP-2. The well-known bitonic sorting algorithm is selected for experiments. Various message sizes are used to determine when, where, how much and why overlapping takes place. Experimental results indicate that both multiprocessors would yield up to 30% to 40% overlap of communication time when the message size is approximately 1K integers. EM-X is found message-size insensitive yielding high overlap for various message sizes while SP-2 was effective for the window of message size 512 to 2K integers.