A Concurrent Multi Target Tracker : Benchmarkingand Portability 1

With the current advances in computing and network technology and software, the gap between parallel and distributed computing environment is gradually becoming narrower. Consequently, parallel programs run on parallel as well as distributed systems. However, programming and porting complex applications to such environment is challenging task and not well understood. In this paper, we use a concurrent multi target tracker as a running example to analyze and evaluate performance of two di erent parallel implementations on parallel and distributed systems. We have benchmarked both these implementations on di erent architectures that vary from a network of workstations(SUN, IBM RS6000) to parallel computers (CM5, iPSC 860) using di erent parallel/distributed message passing tools(PVM, p4, EXPRESS, HORUS). We have also compared the performance of these tools to provide important communication primitives for high performance computing applications such as send/receive, broadcast and circular communication.