Parallel Algorithms on Clusters of Multicores: Comparing Message Passing vs Hybrid Programming

摘要

Given the technological progress of current processors and the appearance of the multi-core cluster architecture, the assessment of different parallel programming techniques that allow exploiting the new memory hierarchy provided by the architecture becomes important. The purpose of this paper is to carry out a comparative analysis of two parallel programming paradigms- message passing and hybrid programming (where message passing and shared memory are combined). The testing architecture used for the experimental analysis is a multi-core cluster formed by 16 nodes (blades), each blade with 2 quad core processors (128 cores total). The study case chosen was square matrix multiplication, analyzing scalability by increasing the size of the problem and the number of processing cores used.