Abstract
When developing programs for a network of workstations, a
tedious and time consuming task consists of handling the communication and synchronization in a correct and efficient way. Correct means in this context, that it is guaranteed, that each process running on a particular
machine will receive the appropriate data and that the program will not deadlock. With the term efficient we mean a minimum amount of overhead needed for communication and synchronization, thus giving low execution times and high speedup. A variety of tools have been developed supporting the user in this task. These tools include a parallelizing compiler, programming environments, and finally tools for message passing synchronization primitives. The developers of these tools claim, that their tools are easy to use, but will still produce efficient and correct code. But are all the tools equally efficient? To get an answer, a study has been performed evaluating five of the most commonly used tools, namely PVM 2.x, PVM 3.x, p4, Express (a registered Trademark of Parasoft Inc.) and Linda (a registered Trademark of Scientific Computing Associates Inc.) with respect to efficiency and also ease-of-use. Four kernels of the NAS parallel benchmarks have been selected for implementation on a workstation cluster. The results of this study are summarized in this paper.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Tools and Environments for Parallel and Distributed Systems (Kluwer International Series in Software Engineering, 2) |
| Publisher | Kluwer |
| ISBN (Print) | 0-7923-9675-8 |
| Publication status | Published - 1996 |
Fields of science
- 102 Computer Sciences
- 102002 Augmented reality
- 102006 Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW)
- 102013 Human-computer interaction
- 102015 Information systems
- 102021 Pervasive computing
- 102025 Distributed systems
- 102027 Web engineering
- 202038 Telecommunications