Performance evaluation of MPI and hybrid MPI+OpenMP programming paradigms on multi-core processors cluster

Abstract

Processors design is now switched to multi-core architecture in a direction that minimizes energy consumption. A decade ago CPUs speed could not accelerate without extra ordinary cooling and consequently hit a clock speed barrier. The multi-core architecture is introduced to improve computing performance by providing hardware parallelism through more CPU cores, each having restrained clock speed. This has been a break through in High Performance Computing (HPC). While more processor cores rendered effective execution results, multi-core technology inaugurated an extra layer of complexity for programming issues. To exploit each core in a multi-core environment, application software should be optimized by using multithreading. Multi-core processors can even degrade the performance for single threaded application due to reduction in clock speed. In this paper we compare performance of multithreading fine-grained and course-grained computational problems further flavored as computation-intensive and data-intensive problems by using MPI and hybrid MPI+OpenMP approach and evaluate suitability of multi-core cluster depending on the nature of the problems.