Benchmarking the computation and communication performance of the CM-5

Thinking Machines' CM‐5 machine is a distributed‐memory, message‐passing computer. In the paper we devise a performance benchmark for the base and vector units and the data communication networks of the CM‐5 machine. We model the communication characteristics such as communication latency and bandwidths of point‐to‐point and global communication primitives. We show, on a simple Gaussian elimination code, that an accurate static performance estimation of parallel algorithms is possible by using those basic machine properties connected with computation, vectorization, communication and synchronization. Futhermore, we describe the embedding of meshes or hypercubes on the CM‐5 fat‐tree topology and illustrate the performance results of their basic communication primitives.