Development of an experimental setup for studying parallel processing

Abstract

The teaching of the fundamentals of parallel processing is becoming increasingly important in undergraduate Computer Engineering and Computer Science programs. This paper discusses the development of a simple laboratory environment designed for the study and testing of principles governing the performance of parallel processors. The laboratory environment is structured to be simple enough for undergraduate use, flexible enough to test the many facets of parallel processing, and sophisticated enough to give results applicable to larger scale parallel processors. Particular emphasis in this paper is placed on tests that were run to examine the suitability of the laboratory to support experimentation with shared memory multi-processors. The main test involved investigating the influence of communication and calculation times on the amount of synchronization overhead in the system.