Performance Evaluation of Message Passing vs. Multi-threading Parallel Programming Paradigms on Multi-core Systems

Abstract

Present and future multi-core computational system architecture attracts researchers to utilize this architecture as an adequate and inexpensive solution to achieve high performance computation for many problems. The multi-core architecture enables us to implement shared memory and/or message passing parallel processing paradigms. Therefore, we need appropriate standard libraries in order to utilize the resources of this architecture efficiently and effectively. In this work, we evaluate the performance of message passing using two versions of the well-known message passing interface (MPI) library: MPICH1 vs. MPICH2. Furthermore, we compared the performance of shared memory using OpenMP that supports multithreading with MPI. The results show that the performance when MPICH2 is used is better than MPICH1. The results indicate that multithreading performs better than message passing.