Performance Evaluation of a Multiprocessor Cluster for a Thermohydrodynamic Lubrication Analysis

This study presents a performance evaluation of two parallel programming paradigms, OpenMP and message-passing interface (MPI), for thermohydrodynamic lubrication analysis. In this study the performance of parallel computing in MPI cluster is equivalent to a similarly configured single-system image cluster. For a reasonable parallel efficiency (75%) the experimentally determined minimum execution times for the tasks to be conducted in parallel are approximate 0.5 and 5.0 seconds for OpenMP and MPI parallelism, respectively. It is noted that OpenMP programming allows parallel applications to be developed incrementally and supports fine-grain communication in a very cost effective manner. A computer program written in part to perform two or more tasks simultaneously may well be a computation norm in future tribological study.