Benchmarking parallel processing platforms: an applications perspective

Given the increased availability of general purpose parallel computers two issues arise: One needs to compare the performance of the different available platforms using realistic examples, and it is necessary to write application software that can be ported easily in order to take advantage of different platforms. The authors address these issues from an applications point of view. They are interested in the use of general purpose parallel computers for simulation tasks needed during the design of very large scale integrated (VLSI) circuits. They characterize the simulation task as a useful benchmark and introduce a high level process view of parallel simulation that is helpful for deriving portable parallel programs. Details of the partitioning strategy and the simulation algorithm used in the application are given. They discuss their implementation on different parallel machines and give statistics of various experiments