Investigate and Parallel Processing using E1350 IBM eServer Cluster: A Parallel Programming Experience

The objective of this project report is to explore the architecture of E1350 IBM eServer Cluster and parallel programming in OpenMP, MPI and MPI+OpenMP using Intel C/C++ Compilers. By implementing some applications using these programming models, we can analyze the effects of each of the model on speedup. I have used four applications to analyze the effects that are Jacobi Iterative Method, Alternating Direction Implicit (ADI), Matrix Multiplication and Bucket Sorting. The general observations are as follows: • Using MPI and MPI+OpenMP will not give significant speedup if used directly with the same program structure. We need to have modified the structure of the programs to reduce communication-to-computation ratio as much as possible. • Running threads on different physical processors can cause significant barrier. • When using 8-threads, synchronization must occur between all threads and this need communications between two physical processors. • Communications between two physical processors is expensive compare to communications between cores. Thus, more cost is paid in term of more waiting time at barrier.