Journal of Engineering Science and Technology (Oct 2014)
PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS BETWEEN EXPLICIT SCHEDULING AND IMPLICIT SCHEDULING OF PARALLEL ARRAY-BASED DOMAIN DECOMPOSITION USING OPENMP
Abstract
With the continuous revolution of multicore architecture, several parallel programming platforms have been introduced in order to pave the way for fast and efficient development of parallel algorithms. Back into its categories, parallel computing can be done through two forms: Data-Level Parallelism (DLP) or Task-Level Parallelism (TLP). The former can be done by the distribution of data among the available processing elements while the latter is based on executing independent tasks concurrently. Most of the parallel programming platforms have built-in techniques to distribute the data among processors, these techniques are technically known as automatic distribution (scheduling). However, due to their wide range of purposes, variation of data types, amount of distributed data, possibility of extra computational overhead and other hardware-dependent factors, manual distribution could achieve better outcomes in terms of performance when compared to the automatic distribution. In this paper, this assumption is investigated by conducting a comparison between automatic and our newly proposed manual distribution of data among threads in parallel. Empirical results of matrix addition and matrix multiplication show a considerable performance gain when manual distribution is applied against automatic distribution.