Benchmarking Parallel Machines Via A Software Architecture

The diversity in parallel architectures and the programming styles induced thereof, make benchmarking of parallel machines a hard problem. Current benchmarking techniques are limited in applicability due to the issues of portability. We present a different approach to benchmarking parallel machines, which would make the resulting benchmarks portable, easy to use and widely applicable. The approach involves the use of a software architecture to mask the diversities of the underlying architectures. The benchmarks are based on the Linda Tuple Space, and is called BeLinda. In this report, we motivate the use of a software architecture, give a specification of the benchmark suite, discuss its implementation on three radically different architectures, and present the results of the benchmark. 1. Introduction Performance evaluation of parallel architectures is a hard problem. Firstly, one is faced with the aspect of diversity. We currently have parallel machines whose architectures are total..