Comparison of Shared memory based parallel programming models

Parallel programming models are quite challenging and emerging topic in the parallel computing era. These models allow a developer to port a sequential application on to a platform with more number of processors so that the problem or application can be solved easily. Adapting the applications in this manner using the Parallel programming models is often influenced by the type of the application, the type of the platform and many others. There are several parallel programming models developed and two main variants of parallel programming models classified are shared and distributed memory based parallel programming models. The recognition of the computing applications that entail immense computing requirements lead to the confrontation of the obstacle regarding the development of the efficient programming models that bridges the gap between the hardware ability to perform the computations and the software ability to support that performance for those applications [25][9]. And so a better programming model is needed that facilitates easy development and on the other hand porting high performance. To answer this challenge this thesis confines and compares four different shared memory based parallel programming models with respect to the development time of the application under a shared memory based parallel programming model to the performance enacted by that application in the same parallel programming model. The programming models are evaluated in this thesis by considering the data parallel applications and to verify their ability to support data parallelism with respect to the development time of those applications. The data parallel applications are borrowed from the Dense Matrix dwarfs and the dwarfs used are Matrix-Matrix multiplication, Jacobi Iteration and Laplace Heat Distribution. The experimental method consists of the selection of three data parallel bench marks and developed under the four shared memory based parallel programming models considered for the evaluation. Also the performance of those applications under each programming model is noted and at last the results are used to analytically compare the parallel programming models. Results for the study show that by sacrificing the development time a better performance is achieved for the chosen data parallel applications developed in Pthreads. On the other hand sacrificing a little performance data parallel applications are extremely easy to develop in task based parallel programming models. The directive models are moderate from both the perspectives and are rated in between the tasking models and threading models.From this study it is clear that threading model Pthreads model is identified as a dominant programming model by supporting high speedups for two of the three different dwarfs but on the other hand the tasking models are dominant in the development time and reducing the number of errors by supporting high growth in speedup for the applications without any communication and less growth in self-relative speedup for the applications involving communications. The degrade of the performance by the tasking models for the problems based on communications is because task based models are designed and bounded to execute the tasks in parallel without out any interruptions or preemptions during their computations. Introducing the communications violates the purpose and there by resulting in less performance. The directive model OpenMP is moderate in both aspects and stands in between these models. In general the directive models and tasking models offer better speedup than any other models for the task based problems which are based on the divide and conquer strategy. But for the data parallelism the speedup growth however achieved is low (i.e. they are less scalable for data parallel applications) are equally compatible in execution times with threading models. Also the development times are considerably low for data parallel applications this is because of the ease of development supported by those models by introducing less number of functional routines required to parallelize the applications. This thesis is concerned about the comparison of the shared memory based parallel programming models in terms of the speedup. This type of work acts as a hand in guide that the programmers can consider during the development of the applications under the shared memory based parallel programming models. We suggest that this work can be extended in two different ways: one is from the developer‘s perspective and the other is a cross-referential study about the parallel programming models. The former can be done by using a similar study like this by a different programmer and comparing this study with the new study. The latter can be done by including multiple data points in the same programming model or by using a different set of parallel programming models for the study.C/O K. Manoj Kumar; LGH 555; Lindbloms Vägan 97; 37233; Ronneby. Phone no: 0738743400 Home country phone no: +91 994867155