Performance of Distributed Memory Methods in Multiprocessing Clusters

The availability of multiprocessing workstations offers the opportunity to simultaneously apply both sharedand distributed-memory parallel processing techniques to a single application. It has been assumed that using the datasharing formalisms native to the specific machine would yield performance superior to those obtained with a more general message-passing system. We compared the performance of pure message-passing methods with a combination of message-passing and shared-memory data sharing techniques and found that the benefit of the added complexity of dual-level programming is negligible or non-existent.