PAWS; A performance evaluation tool for parallel computing systems
Fifteen years ago, most large-scale scientific and engineering computations were performed on sequential von Neumann machines. Comparisons among these machines focused on running sets of common benchmarks and on ranking the machines based on the number of instructions executed per second. However, as the number of commercial systems increased, so did the diversity of their architectural design. As each new architecture diverged from the classical von Neumann model, new languages and annotated versions of older sequential languages were developed for execution on these new machines. This made it difficult to run a standard benchmark. Not only did each benchmark require translation into each language, but the translation process and newer optimizing compilers obscured the relative merit of the results. To date, no formal methods allow comparisons among different machines running a single common application. Furthermore, code is generally not portable among different parallel processing machines. This forces applications to be recoded for each language and each machine. PAWS (Parallel Assessment Window System) is an experimental system for performing machine evaluation and comparisons.
- OSTI ID:
- 6042959
- Journal Information:
- Computer; (United States), Journal Name: Computer; (United States) Vol. 24:1; ISSN 0018-9162; ISSN CPTRB
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Selected reprints on dataflow and reduction architectures
SOVAR: Smart memories for out-of-order execution VLSI architectures
Related Subjects
990200* -- Mathematics & Computers
BENCHMARKS
COMPARATIVE EVALUATIONS
COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE
COMPUTER OUTPUT DEVICES
COMPUTER-GRAPHICS DEVICES
DATA-FLOW PROCESSING
DISPLAY DEVICES
EVALUATION
PARALLEL PROCESSING
PERFORMANCE TESTING
PROGRAMMING
PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
TESTING