NPAC Technical Report SCCS-643
Software Tool Evaluation Methodology
Salim Hariri, Sung-Yong Park, Rajashekar Reddy, Mahesh Subramanyan, Rajesh Yadav, Geoffrey Fox, Manish Parashar
Submitted November 1 1994
Abstract
The recent development of parallel and distributed computing software
has introduced a variety of software tools that support several programming
paradigms and languages.
This variety of tools makes the selection of the best tool to run a given
class of applications on a parallel or distributed system a non-trivial task
that requires some investigation.
We expect tool evaluation to receive more attention as the deployment and
usage of distributed systems increases.
In this paper, we present a multi-level evaluation methodology for
parallel/distributed tools in which tools are evaluated from different
perspectives.
We apply our evaluation methodology to three message passing tools viz
Express, p4, and PVM.
The approach covers several important distributed systems
platforms consisting of different computers (e.g., IBM-SP1, Alpha cluster, SUN
workstations) interconnected by different types of networks (e.g., Ethernet,
FDDI, ATM).