Sensitivity of Performance Prediction of Message Passing Programs

This paper discusses the issues related to the accuracy of performance prediction tools for message passing programs. We present the results of two sets of experiments to quantify the effect of the instrumentation overhead and variance in the accuracy of Dimemas. The results show that this performance prediction tool can be used with a high level of confidence as the effect of instrumentation overhead on the predicted performance is minimal. We also show that it is possible to carry out instrumentation runs in highly loaded multi-user environments and still be able to accurately analyze the performance of the application as if it had run alone.