PARALLELIZING A LEVEL-3 BLAS LIBRARY FOR LAN-CONNECTED WORKSTATIONS

LAN-connected workstations are a heterogeneous environment, where each workstation provides time-varying computing power, and thus dynamic l oad balancing mechanisms are necessary for parallel applications to ru n efficiently. Parallel basic linear algebra subprograms (BLAS) have r ecently shown promise as a means of taking advantage of parallel compu ting in solving scientific problems. Most existing parallel algorithms of BLAS are designed for conventional parallel computers; they do not take the particular characteristics of LAN-connected workstations int o consideration. This paper presents a parallelizing method of Level 3 BLAS for LAN-connected workstations. The parallelizing method makes d ynamic load balancing through column-blocking data distribution. The e xperiment results indicate that this dynamic load balancing mechanism really leads to a more efficient parallel level 3 BLAS for LAN-connect ed workstations. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.