Empirical analysis of parallelism overheads on CMPs

Abstract

OpenMP and Intel Threading Building Blocks (TBB) are two parallel programming paradigms for multicore processors. They have a lot in common but were designed in mind for different parallel execution models. Comparing the performance gain of these two paradigms depends to a great extent on the parallelization overheads of their parallel mechanisms. Parallel overheads are inevitable and therefore understanding their potential costs can help developers to design more scalable applications. This paper presents a comparative study of OpenMP and TBB parallelization overheads. The study was conducted on a dual-core machine with two different compilers, Intel compiler and Microsoft Visual Studio C++ 2008, and shows that Intel compiler outperforms Microsoft compiler. Nevertheless, the relative performance of TBB versus OpenMP is mainly depends on the implementation of the parallel constructs of a specific compiler. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.