Because many universities lack the funds to purchase expensive parallel computers, cost effective alternatives are needed to teach students about parallel processing. Free software is available to support the three major paradigms of parallel computing. Parallaxis is a sophisticated SIMD simulator which runs on a variety of platforms.jBACI shared memory simulator supports the MIMD model of computing with a common shared memory. PVM and MPI allow students to treat a network of workstations as a message passing MIMD multicomputer with distributed memory. Each of this software tools can be used in a variety of courses to give students experience with parallel algorithms.
Effects of Multicore Distributed Memory Systems on Parallel Processing Applications
