Summary form only given. Motivated by observations about job runtimes on the CPlant
system, we use a trace-driven microsimulator to begin characterizing the performance of
different classes of allocation algorithms on jobs with different communication patterns in
space-shared parallel systems with mesh topology. We show that relative performance
varies considerably with communication pattern. The paging strategy using the Hilbert space-
filling curve and the best fit heuristic performed best across several communication patterns.

Motivated by observations about job runtimes on the CPlant system, we use a trace-driven
microsimulator to begin characterizing the performance of different classes of allocation
algorithms on jobs with different communication patterns in space-shared parallel systems
with mesh topology. We show that relative performance varies considerably with
communication pattern. The Paging strategy using the Hilbert space-filling curve and the
Best Fit heuristic performed best across several communication patterns.