Programming environments for parallel computing: a comparison of CPS, Linda, P4, PVM, POSYBL, and TCGMSG

Six portable parallel programming environments are compared. Results for two-node communication benchmarks are reported for each environment. Results for the more complicated four-node communications tests are reported for all of the environments except CPS. In every case, the benchmarks were run on an isolated Ethernet network of identical SPARCstation 1 workstations to assure reproducibility. Earlier reports based on this work omitted any opinions about the utility of these environments; in essence, the communication times were left to speak for themselves. In this paper, these opinions are included; they are useful to consider since they are based on a unique experience/spl minus/the experience of running two programs written with six different programming environments.<>