E ciency Evaluation of Selected Parallelization Tools

Although the processing power of uniprocessor sys tems is signi cantly increasing every year there is a never ending quest for peak performance The so called grand challenges in computing require more computing power than a single uniprocessor machine can ever o er Recent advances in parallel processing however has brought the solution of grand challenges into reach What is usually neglected when reporting on peak performance and Tera ops is the e ort which would be necessary for implementing an e cient application Handling all the communication which is needed in a parallel algorithm is probably not the most di cult part for the programmer but often the most annoy ing part To support or even automate this task a variety of programming tools and libraries has been developed An interesting question is now to investigate and compare the performance obtained when using such tools and the e ort for using these tools For that pur pose an evaluation project has been started on a clus ter of nine workstations using the ve most commonly used tools namely PVM x Version PVM x Version p Version patches Express Version and Linda Version The Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation NAS parallel benchmark suite which consists of ve ker nels and three simulated application benchmarks was used for the performance evaluation Four of the ker nels were implemented on the cluster An Embar rassingly Parallel Benchmark to get used with the