Survey on parallel programming model

Abstract

The development of microprocessors design has been shifting to multi-core architectures. Therefore, it is expected that parallelism will play a significant role in future generations of applications. Throughout the years, there has been a myriad number of parallel programming models proposed. In choosing a parallel programming model, not only the performance aspect is important, but also qualitative the aspect of how well parallelism is abstracted to developers. A model with a well abstraction of parallelism leads to a higher application-development productivity. In this paper, we propose seven criteria to qualitatively evaluate parallel programming models. Our focus is on how parallelism is abstracted and presented to application developers. As a case study, we use these criteria to investigate six well-known parallel programming models in the HPC community. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.