Abstract

On account of the growing number of workstations networks, many communication libraries are now also used outside the parallel computers area. Among those communication libraries, Message Passing Interface (MPI) appears to be an attempt of standardisation for distributedmemory computing systems. However, most people still prefer the other libraries, arguing about MPI's efficiency. The aim of our study is to evaluate the overhead introduced by these different communication libraries and to point out the cost of heterogeneous workstations' use. We tested the well-known de facto standards like PVM or P4, and some MPI implementations available in the public domain, on homogeneous and heterogeneous environments. Our results show that MPI implementations, can also achieve efficient results as good as PVM, but that a stronger heterogeneous support will be needed in the future, because of the increasing speed of networks. 1 Introduction Numerous Message Passing Libraries are available in the ...

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