X. Zhang, Y. Yan and K. He, 
``Evaluation and measurement of multiprocessor latency patterns", 

The paper was presented and published in Proceedings of the 8th 
International Parallel Processing 
Symposium (IPPS'94), IEEE Press, April, 1994, pp. 845-852.

Abstract 
-------- 

Network latency, the delay caused by communication between processors
and memory modules over the network in a multiprocessor system, is
a major
source of degraded parallel computing performance.
In this paper, we first give an overview of an experimental metric
which uses network latency to measure and evaluate the
scalability of parallel programs and architectures.
We put emphasis on evaluation of latency sources and their
methods in program execution.
We report experimental results of evaluating the scalability of
several scientific computing
algorithms on the KSR-1. In comparison, we also
present preliminary experiments on the CM-5 multicomputer architecture.
Our comparisons indicate that
the CM-5 has less network latency effects and is a more scalable architecture
the the KSR-1.
The analyses and
experiments show that the latency metric is an important method
to effectively measure
overheads inherent in the program and the architecture for
parallel computing scalability evaluation.