EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION OF BSP PROGRAMMING LIBRARIES

Abstract

The model of bulk-synchronous parallel computation (BSP) helps to implement portable general purpose algorithms while maintaining predictable performance on different parallel computers. Nevertheless, when programming in ‘BSP style’, the running time of the implementation of an algorithm can be very dependent on the underlying communication library. In this study, an overview of existing approaches to practical BSP programming in C/C++ or Fortran is given and benchmarks were run for the two main BSP-like communication libraries, the Oxford BSP Toolset and PUB. Furthermore, a memory efficient matrix multiplication algorithm was implemented and used to compare their performance on different parallel computers and to evaluate the compliance with predictions by theoretical results.