A Case Study of Application Analytical Modeling in Heterogeneous Computing Environments: Cholesky Factorization in a NOW.

Achieving satisfactory performance results in heterogeneous computing environments, such as network of workstations (NOWs) made up of dissimilar processing elements, requires a careful choice of the workload to be assigned to each target machine. The use of approximate analytical models can help to understand which are the parameters that mostly affect performance. In this paper we will show how to study analytically the behavior of an existing parallel program, a Cholesky factorization code, running in a heterogeneous NOW under the PVM run-time system. Firstly, the Cholesky factorization algorithm is introduced, along with a description of the target computing environment. After an analysis of the load distribution, the construction of the analytical model of the application is described in thorough detail. Finally, the results predicted through the model are compared to the performance figures obtained by executing the program in the real computing environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]