Benchmarking Pthreads Performance

The importance of the performance of threads libraries is growing as clusters of shared memory machines become more popular POSIX threads, or Pthreads, is an industry threads library standard. We have implemented the first Pthreads benchmark suite. In addition to measuring basic thread functions, such as thread creation, we apply the L.ogP model to standard Pthreads communication mechanisms. We present the results of our tests for several hardware platforms. These results demonstrate that the performance of existing Pthreads implementations varies widely; parts of nearly all of these implementations could be further optimized. Since hardware differences do not fully explain these performance variations, optimizations could improve the implementations. 2. Incorporating Threads Benchmarks into SKaMPI is an MPI benchmark suite that provides a general framework for performance analysis [7]. SKaMPI does not exhaustively test the MPI standard. Instead, it