Processing elements on multiprocessor system may interact by sending messages over communication mechanisms. As the number of processors increases, the communication dominates the whole computation, thus it may becomes bottleneck.
In this paper, we analyze the characteristics of communication mechanisms by a simulation study on a generic model for multiprocessor systems. The communication mechanisms are classified in to two subsystem: point-to-point communication subsystem and multi-points communication subsystem. To analyze, we build a model for communication subsystem out of those two subsystems for the generic grid topology multiprocessor system, and perform the simulation based on four parameters: number of processors, message generation rate, message destination patterns, and locality by means of message generation functions.
The result shows that multi-points subsystem has more dependent on message traffic density on the channel rather than point-to-point subsystem. The point-to-point subsystem is more vulnerable to the locality of the message pattern.
