PSDM: An E cient Parallel Software Design Model

We present in this paper a parallel software design approach for developing synchronous and deterministic parallel applications. The approach is supported by a graph-ical design model (called PSDM) which serves as a visualization tool for representing and analyzing the application design prior to implementation. The main advantage in using the model is that it identiies clearly the time spent idling, computing, and communicating in parallel processes, thus allowing the software designer to optimize the required resources and runtime of the application at the design stage. The use of the design approach and its associated model is demonstrated by optimizing tree-based, pipeline-based, and ring-based communication functions. These optimized functions are in turn used to achieve better performance than that of the most recently reported balanced parallel quicksort and pipelined matrix multiplication. We also implemented parallel matrix triangularization on a ring with satisfactory eeciency.