Evaluating the performance of parallel programs in a distributed environment

Considers methods of evaluating the performance of programs using recent communication harnesses. A demand-based data-farming parallel programming paradigm is used. Possible techniques for performance prediction are examined and a description of a particular method is given, for a shared distributed environment, involving a diffusion approximation. Selected results from a benchmarking study are given to establish the validity of the performance model. A theme of this study is a comparison with a previous transputer-based implementation