Restructuring and Extensible Simulator for Shared Memory and Message Passing Parallel Programs

This paper presents an object-oriented simulation environment to evaluate and restructure parallel programs for software distributed shared memory (DSM) systems. This simulator provides a toolbox for various network topologies and communication parameters. The simulator models a software DSM system that can support shared memory as well as message passing. Prediction of performance of parallel programs helps the compilers to analyze, transform and to generate efficient and highly parallel code. The performance characteristics like speedup and message passing delays help also in the design of a parallel machine under development by predicting its performance using benchmark programs. This simulator is designed to study the performance characteristics of the shared memory parallel programs and also message passing parallel programs. Four popular parallel algorithms - Reduction, Radix sort (SPLASH-2), Block matrix multiplication and Hyper quicksort have been studied using this simulator and the results are presented.