An environment for transputer CPU load measurements

In a multiprocessor system an uneven load balancing can usually dramatically reduce the performance of the parallel program running on it. Hence it is of paramount importance to be able to estimate the CPU and communication loads of every task before the program is actually executed so that the optimal application partitioning can be found. In this paper the problem of CPU load measurement is tackled, and a measurement environment is illustrated in which the processes to be allocated to the processors in the network are run in quasi-concurrence on a single Transputer. A technique based on active process list manipulation makes it possible to perform a fairly accurate measurement of the CPU activity of the parallel processes in the application using the Transputer internal tinier as a reference clock.