Software Tool Evaluation Methodology

The recent development of parallel and distributed computing software has introduced a variety of software tools that support several programming paradigms and languages. This variety of tools makes the selection of the best tool to run a given class of applications on a parallel or distributed system a non-trivial task that requires some investigation. We expect tool evaluation to receive more attention as the deployment and usage of distributed systems increases. In this paper , we present a multi-level evaluation methodology for parallel/distributed tools in which tools are evaluated from diierent perspectives. We apply our evaluation methodology to three message passing tools viz Express , p4, and PVM. The approach covers several important distributed systems platforms consisting of different computers (e.g., IBM-SP1, Alpha cluster, SUN workstations) interconnected by diierent types of net