Viability of Multithreading on Networks of Workstations
by Hantak Kwak, Ben Lee, Ali R. Hurson
Abstract:
Recent trend in high-performance computing focuses on networks of workstations (NOWs) as a way of realizing cost-effective parallel machines. This has been due to the availability of powerful wide-issue processors, high-speed networks, and software infrastructure systems. Due to its distributed nature, messagepassing has been the choice of communication model for NOWs. This paper, however, examines the viability of using multithreading on NOWs. A matrix multiplication algorithm was studied by simulating a shared-memory abstraction on top of Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) to characterize the behavior of multithreading. Our experiments indicate the performance of multithreading, with a small number of threads per processor, is very comparable to that of programs written using messagepassing. Our studies also show multithreading has an added advantage over messagepassing in that it is relatively insensitive to initial data distribution.
Keywords: software
Source:
H. Kwak, B. Lee, A.R. Hurson, Viability of Multithreading on Networks of Workstations. In V. Malyshkin (ed.),
Parallel Computing Technologies: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference,
Lect. Notes in Comp. Sci., Vol. 1277, Springer, 1997, pp. 216-225
