Appearances of the Birthday Paradox in High Performance Computing

09/26/2019

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by   Victor Eijkhout, et al.

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We give an elementary statistical analysis of two High Performance Computing issues, processor cache mapping and network port mapping. In both cases we find that, as in the birthday paradox, random assignment leads to more frequent coincidences than one expects a priori. Since these correspond to contention for limited resources, this phenomenon has important consequences for performance.