Performance Evaluation of MPI, UPC and OpenMP on Multicore Architectures

  • Authors:

  • Damián A. Mallón;Guillermo L. Taboada;Carlos Teijeiro;Juan Touriño;Basilio B. Fraguela;Andrés Gómez;Ramón Doallo;J. Carlos Mouriño

  • Affiliations:

  • Galicia Supercomputing Center (CESGA), Santiago de Compostela, Spain;Computer Architecture Group, University of A Coruña, A Coruña, Spain;Computer Architecture Group, University of A Coruña, A Coruña, Spain;Computer Architecture Group, University of A Coruña, A Coruña, Spain;Computer Architecture Group, University of A Coruña, A Coruña, Spain;Galicia Supercomputing Center (CESGA), Santiago de Compostela, Spain;Computer Architecture Group, University of A Coruña, A Coruña, Spain;Galicia Supercomputing Center (CESGA), Santiago de Compostela, Spain

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 16th European PVM/MPI Users' Group Meeting on Recent Advances in Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

The current trend to multicore architectures underscores the need of parallelism. While new languages and alternatives for supporting more efficiently these systems are proposed, MPI faces this new challenge. Therefore, up-to-date performance evaluations of current options for programming multicore systems are needed. This paper evaluates MPI performance against Unified Parallel C (UPC) and OpenMP on multicore architectures. From the analysis of the results, it can be concluded that MPI is generally the best choice on multicore systems with both shared and hybrid shared/distributed memory, as it takes the highest advantage of data locality, the key factor for performance in these systems. Regarding UPC, although it exploits efficiently the data layout in memory, it suffers from remote shared memory accesses, whereas OpenMP usually lacks efficient data locality support and is restricted to shared memory systems, which limits its scalability.