A performance comparison of DSM, PVM, and MPI

We compare the performance of the Treadmarks DSM system with two popular message passing systems (PVM and MPI). The comparison is done on 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 24, and 32 nodes. Applications are chosen to represent three classes of problems: loosely synchronous, embarrassingly parallel, and synchronous. The results show DSM has similar performance to message passing for the embarrassingly parallel class. However the performance of DSM is lower than PVM and MPI for the synchronous and loosely synchronous classes of problems. An analysis of the reasons is presented.