Measuring Parallelism in Computation-Intensive Scientific/Engineering Applications

Abstract

A software tool for measuring parallelism in large scientific/engineering applications is described in this paper. The proposed tool measures the total parallelism present in programs, filtering out the effects of communication/synchronization delays, finite storage, limited number of processors, the policies for management of processors and storage, etc. Although an ideal machine which can exploit the total parallelism is not realizable, such measures would aid the calibration and design of various architectures/compilers. The proposed software tool accepts ordinary Fortran programs as its input. Therefore, parallelism can be measured easily on many fairly big programs. Some measurements for parallelism obtained with the help of this tool are also reported. It is observed that the average parallelism in the chosen programs is in the range of 500–3500 Fortran statements executing concurrently in each clock cycle in an idealized environment. © 1988 IEEE