Patent ID: 8055879

Claim:
A method of tracking network contention on links among compute nodes of an operational group in a point-to-point data communications network of a parallel computer, each compute node connected to an adjacent compute node in the point-to-point data communications network through a link, the method comprising: maintaining, by a network contention module executing at run time on each compute node in the operational group, a local contention counter for each compute node, each local contention counter representing network contention on links among the compute nodes originating from a compute node; and maintaining a global contention counter, the global contention counter representing network contention currently on all links among the compute nodes in the operational group, wherein maintaining a global contention counter further comprises: summing, in the global contention counter, all current values of each local contention counter for each compute node in the operational group; and distributing the global contention counter to all compute nodes in the operational group.