Abstract

The recent rapid growth of the network computing applications area has been accelerated by a variety of parallel and distributed computing (PDC) software tools that simplify process management, inter-process communication, and program debugging in a PDC environment. This variety of software tools varies significantly in terms of the application domain targeted and corresponding functionality provided, the computational and communication model supported, the underlying implementation philosophy, and the computing environments supported. This makes the selection of the best tool to run a given class of applications on a parallel or distributed system a non-trivial task that requires some investigation. Currently, there are no general criteria to evaluate PDC software tools, nor is it easy to lay down such criteria. In this paper we present a multilevel evaluation methodology for PDC software tools in which tools are evaluated from three different perspectives: tool performance level (TPL...

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