Experiences on implementing PARMACS macros to run the SPLASH-2 suite on multiprocessors

In order to evaluate the goodness of parallel systems, it is necessary to know how parallel programs behave. The SPLASH-2 applications provide us with a realistic workload for such systems. So, we have made different implementations of the PARMACS macros used by SPLASH-2 applications, based on several execution and synchronization models, from classical Unix processes to multithreaded systems. Results have been tested in two different multiprocessor systems (Digital and Silicon Graphics). As parallel constructs in the SPLASH-2 applications are limited to those provided by PARMACS, we can easily study the overhead introduced by synchronization and parallelism management.