Programming Environments for Parallel and Distributed Computing: a Comparison of P4, Pvm, Linda, and Tcgmsg

Parallel programmers must choose from a confusing array of parallel programming environments. When success has to be measured by the success of applica tion-software development rather than theoretical re search, the choice must be made quickly without the luxury of experimentation. In this paper, we help the programmer make this choice by looking closely at four of the most heavily used portable programming environments—p4, PVM, TCGMSG, and Linda. For each of these programming environments, we look at three different programs: one that computes π by numerical integration and two that benchmark communication performance. The four programming environments are analyzed in terms of performance, support, ease of coding, and ease of debugging.

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