Study of parallel efficiency in message passing environments

A benchmark test using the Message Passing Interface (MPI, an emerging standard for writing message passing programs) has been developed, to study parallel performance in message passing environments. The test is comprised of a computational task of independent calculations followed by a round-robin data communication step. Performance data as a function of computational granularity and message passing requirements are presented for the IBM SPx at Argonne National Laboratory and for a cluster of quasi-dedicated SUN SPARC Station 20`s. In the later portion of the paper a widely accepted communication cost model combined with Amdahl`s law is used to obtain performance predictions for uneven distributed computational work loads