WWW/Internet - Portal do Software Público Brasileiro

IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2010PARALLEL PROGRAMMING FOR EDUCATION AND ITSTRIAL EVALUATIONKeiichi Shiraishi*, Yoshiro Imai** and Yukio Hori***Kagawa National College of Technology, Koda551 Takuma-cho Mitoyo city Kagawa Pref. 769-1192 Japan**Faculty of Engineering, Kagawa University, 2217-20 Hayashi-cho Takamatsu city Kagawa Pref. 761-0396 JapanABSTRACTInternet and Cloud computing will provide several kinds of services including parallel computing. Parallel computing canbe achieved through a computer cluster (Internet itself) and special multiple computer/ processor systems. Users ofInternet may be more familiar to obtain such parallel computing services in consequences. This paper focuses on parallelcomputing, evaluation of its performance and two kinds pf parallel programming examples based on master-workerparadigm. Such programming can be realized and executed on CPUs with multiple processor cores. We have comparedtwo types of parallel programming. One is programming for a), which is executed on a personal computer of the specificCPU with 4 processor cores. Another is for Cell B.E. with SPE library on Sony-produced PLAYSTATION3. Throughreal experiment and simple evaluation, the following evidences have been confirmed. Both of two cases are goodpractices for parallel calculation and expected performance. And the former is suitable for symbolic and/or algebraiccomputation, while the latter is efficient for numerical calculation.KEYWORDSParallel computing, CPUs with multiple processor cores, Amdahl's law, Master-worker paradigm.1. INTRODUCTIONParallel computing becomes more and more popular as various kinds of multiple computer/processor systemare available in several engineering fields. Especially, there are rapid and drastic changes even for end usersto utilize a computer cluster, multiple processor cores and other multiple computer systems through theInternet. Cloud computing will allow such users to have frequent opportunities to challenge for parallelcomputing and programming. Computers have made revolutionary progress by means of memory technology,large-capacity magnetic Disks, and especially powerful microprocessor architecture. And several kinds ofcomputers are considered to be a set of commodity hardware components so that network technologies caneasily bring them into the next stage of cluster computing. Some people say that it must become an importanttask to utilize multiple processors effectively and ecologically in order to obtain fruitful results from theInternet and Cloud computing.In a focus of microprocessors themselves, there were some complicated limitations for speedup based onuniprocessor architecture. The latest trends of speedup mechanism can be shifted into the architecture ofmultiple processor cores for high performance computing, namely parallel computing. Such architecturebecomes a great idea and break-through to improve computing capability. But there are some problems to beresolved in order to achieve efficient programming for parallel computing environment. In other words, it isnecessary for users to combine effectively multiple levels of parallel programming, namely not only clustercomputing for multiple severs bust also parallel programming for multiple processor cores. Education mustplay an important role to provide a good practice to teach even beginners to obtain useful skills in a shortperiod. In higher education for engineering, it will be much more important than past to educate parallelcomputing, especially, parallel programming paradigm and its applicable examples for some specificcomputers with multiple processor cores.This paper will focus on providing such a good practice for parallel programming by means of multipleprocessor cores. In order to show a simple but useful example or methodology for parallel programmingeducation, the paper describes the following four sections. The next section introduces background of parallel257