Published in the Proceedings of the High Performance Parallel Computing Symposium, Applied Research Laboratories: The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, December 2 1999.

A Comparison of Parallel Workstation Sonar Beamforming Implementations

Gregory E. Allen

Applied Research Laboratories: The University of Texas at Austin

P.O. Box 8029, Austin, TX 78713-8029

gallen AT arlut DOT utexas DOT edu

Abstract

We implement a prototype for a 20-GFLOP sonar beamformer with multiple frameworks for parallelism: MPI, Computational Process Networks, and a hybrid of the two. Computational Process Networks is a framework based on the formal Process Network model and Computation Graphs, implemented with lightweight POSIX threads. We benchmark these systems on a Sun Enterprise 4000. On eight UltraSPARC-II processors, we measure speedups of 6.5 for Computational Process Networks, 3.5 for MPI, and 2.9 for the hybrid.