OpenMP and MPI Duke it Out in Benchmarks

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Douglas Eadlne over at Linux Magazine writes that benchmarking OpenMP vs. MPI is a recipe for surprise:

In a previous column, I had an opportunity to test OpenMP and MPI on a brand new 8-core SMP machine. My interest was to see how well MPI codes worked on an SMP platform. The actual machine was an 8-way Intel server that used two Clovertown processors (4-cores per socket). I also understood that many things other than the programming language (i.e. threads or messages) could effect the result, but I just wanted to get a feel for what would happen.The results were rather interesting (see the column). and there was no clear winner. The OpenMP should “blow away” MPI on an SMP assumption did not hold up.”

Read more at insideHPC