Impacts of Topology and Bandwidth on Distributed Shared Memory Systems

Abstract

As high-performance computing designs become increasingly complex, the importance of evaluating with simulation also grows. One of the most critical aspects of distributed computing design is the network architecture; different topologies and bandwidths have dramatic impacts on the overall performance of the system and should be explored to find the optimal design point. This work uses simulations developed to run in the existing Structural Simulation Toolkit v12.1.0 software framework to show that for a hypothetical test case, more complicated network topologies have better overall performance and performance improves with increased bandwidth, making them worth the additional design effort and expense. Specifically, the test case HyperX topology is shown to outperform the next best evaluated topology by thirty percent and is the only topology that did not experience diminishing performance gains with increased bandwidth.

Keywords

• high-performance computing
• distributed shared memory
• topology
• structural simulation toolkit
• optimization