Performance Issues in Parallel Programming

The development of parallel applications requires the availability of tools that support their debugging and tuning. GSPN represent a formalism that is well suited for the construction of formal models of parallel programs that can be used for both validation and evaluation purposes. The analysis of GSPN models of parallel programs provides the information that is needed for deciding whether the objectives contained in the specifications of an application are met and for distributing the computation on a parallel architecture. In this paper we discuss a methodology for directly constructing a GSPN model of an application from its code and for deriving the parameters that are needed for obtaining the optimal allocation of the components of a parallel application on the computational units of a parallel architecture. A simple example is used throughout the paper to illustrate the different steps of the methodology and to show how these GSPN models can be used to check the efficiency of a parallel application.