Performance modeling and measurement of parallelized code for distributed shared memory multiprocessors

This paper presents a model to evaluate the performance and overhead of parallelizing sequential code using compiler directives for multiprocessing on distributed shared memory (DSM) systems. We parallelized the sequential implementation of NAS benchmarks using native Fortran77 compiler directives on an Origin2000, which is a DSM system. We report measurement based performance of these parallelized benchmarks from four perspectives: efficacy of parallelization process; scalability; parallelization overhead; and comparison with hand-parallelized and -optimized version of the same benchmarks. Our results indicate that sequential programs can conveniently be parallelized for DSM systems using compiler directives but realizing performance gains as predicted by the performance model depends primarily on minimizing architecture-specific data locality overhead.