PROGRAMMING ENVIRONMENTS FOR PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING - A COMPARISON OF P4, PVM, LINDA, AND TCGMSG

Parallel programmers must choose from a confusing array of parallel pr ogramming environments. When success has to be measured by the success of application-software development rather than theoretical research, the choice must be made quickly without the luxury of experimentation . In this paper, we help the programmer make this choice by looking cl osely at four of the most heavily used portable programming environmen ts-p4, PVM, TCGMSG, and Linda. For each of these programming environme nts, we look at three different programs: one that computes pi by nume rical integration and two that benchmark communication performance. Th e four programming environments are analyzed in terms of performance, support, ease of coding, and ease of debugging.