Performance of the OpenMP implementations

Performance of the OpenMP implementations

Table 6.9 shows run-times of the two OpenMP implementations on the same two fifteen-city problems that we used to test the Pthreads implementations. The programs

were also run on the same system we used for the Pthreads and serial tests. For ease of comparison, we also show the Pthreads run-times. Run-times are in seconds and the numbers in parentheses show the total number of times stacks were split in the dynamic implementations.

For the most part, the OpenMP implementations are comparable to the Pthreads implementations. This isn’t surprising since the system on which the programs were run has eight cores, and we wouldn’t expect busy-waiting to degrade overall performance unless we were using more threads than cores.

There are two notable exceptions for the first problem. The performance of the static OpenMP implementation with eight threads is much worse than the Pthreads implementation, and the dynamic implementation with four threads is much worse than the Pthreads implementation. This could be a result of the nondeterminism of the programs, but more detailed profiling will be necessary to determine the cause with any certainty.