Implementation Of Parallel Applications Research Articles

Impact of Design Decisions on Performance of Embarrassingly Parallel .NET Database Application

The implementation of parallel applications is always a challenge. It embraces many distinctive design decisions that are to be taken. The paper presents issues of parallel processing with use of .NET applications and popular Database Management Systems (DBMSes). In the paper, four design dilemmas are addressed: how efficient is the auto-parallelism implemented in the .NET TPL library, how do popular DBMSes differ in serving parallel requests, what is the optimal size of data chunks in the data parallelism scheme, and how the TPL auto-parallelism behaves in the public clouds. They are analyzed in the context of the typical and practical business case originated from IT solutions which are dedicated for the energy market participants. The paper presents the results of experiments conducted in a controlled, on-premises and cloud environments. The experiments allowed to compare the performance of the TPL auto-parallelism with a wide range of manually set numbers of worker threads. They also helped to evaluate four DBMSes: Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MSSQL in the scenario of serving parallel queries. Finally, they showed the impact of data chunk sizes on the overall performance.

A dynamic and scalable performance monitoring toolkit for cluster and grid environments

The low-cost and availability of network of workstations have made them an attractive solution for high performance computing. Striking progress of network technology is enabling high-performance global computing in which large sets of diverse and geographically distributed resources are transparently and coordinately employed to solve large-scale problems. In this paper, Visuel toolkit for performance measurement and analysis of parallel applications in cluster and grid environments is presented. It is a web-based interface designed not only to provide dynamic monitoring view and management information, but also performance activity of all computing nodes of computing platform involved in the execution of a parallel application. Evaluations using this toolkit show the effectiveness in easing the process of investigation and implementation of parallel applications.

Parallel processing of chemical information in a local area network — I. HYDRA: Concept, configuration, and implementation of parallel applications

Sophisticated software packages put an increasing demand on computer hardware. In local area networks, computational intensive programs can lower the performance of individual workstations to an unacceptable level. However, utilizing in a coarse grained sense the computing power of all hosts in such networks, offers the potential to achieve considerable improvements in execution speed within reasonable cost limits. Since conventional workstations are not designed to be used in a parallel configuration, the program HYDRA is developed to control and synchronize parallel processing in a local area network. Part I of this paper focuses on the technical aspects of HYDRA, i.e. configuration and implementation. The second and third parts describe two applications of the HYDRA package in the field of chemistry: using parallel genetic algorithms for the conformational analysis of nucleic acids, and parallel cross-validation of artificial neural networks.