Efficient parallel programming with Linda

Abstract

A number of computer scientists have contended that Linda cannot possibly be implemented efficiently on distributed memory machines because there is simply too much overhead. They believe that Linda will not be able to compete with message passing on such machines even for solving computationally intensive problems. The authors address this claim by discussing C-Linda's performance in solving a particular scientific computing problem, the shallow water equations. They have implemented and evaluated the performance of the Linda program on a variety of machines. They present results for shared memory machines (Sequent Symmetry and the Encore Multimax), for distributed memory machines (iPSC/2 and iPSC/860 hypercubes), and for a network of Sparcstations connected by an Ethernet. The same Linda program was executed on all these machines and its performance was evaluated and compared to that of implementations using alternative methods available on all machines. In the authors' experience, the Linda program has generally been easier and more convenient to write than the native versions for each machine. >