Simplified Expression of Message Driven Programs and Quantification of Their Impact on Performance

Communication latency and unpredictable delays in remote response times constitute significant impediments to achieving high performance on massively parallel computers. Message-driven execution is a promising technique to improve the performance of parallel computations by overlapping these delays with useful computation. This thesis explores message-driven execution for improving performance of parallel programs. Programming in message-driven style is difficult due to the split-phase transactions it requires and due to the nondeterministic arrival of messages. We developed language constructs to express dependencies between messages and computations in order to simplify expression of message-driven programs. Predicting the performance of message-driven programs via simulations is difficult because the arrival order of messages changes as the machine characteristics change. We developed a trace-driven simulation methodology based on those language constructs. We also conducted an extensive performance study of message-driven programs.

A. Gursoy, "Simplified Expression of Message Driven Programs and Quantification
of Their Impact on Performance", June 1994, University of Illinois 
at Urbana-Champaign.

@PHDTHESIS{AttilaThesis,
        author = "A. Gursoy",
        title = "Simplified Expression of Message Driven Programs and Quantification of Their Impact on Performance",
        year = "1994",
        month = {June},
        school = {University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign},
        note = "{A}lso, Technical Report UIUCDCS-R-94-1852"
}