A comparative performance study of a fine-grain multi-threading model on distributed memory machines

We present a comparative study of the implementation of the Efficient Architecture for Running THreads (EARTH) on IBM SP-2, Beowulf, and the MANNA machine. EARTH is a programming, architecture, and execution model that implements fine grain multi-threading. Each platform presents different constraints on the interaction between the EARTH runtime system and the network. We characterize the performance in each implementation by measuring the cost of EARTH operations, such as the exchange of synchronization signals, the spawning of threads, and data transfers, and also by comparing speedup curves for a set of applications.