Viability of multithreading on networks of workstations

Abstract

A b s t r a c t . 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, message-passing 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 message-passing. Our studies also show multithreading has an added advantage over message-passing in that it is relatively insensitive to initial data distribution.