8. Performance and Overhead Measurements

The previous sections used a set of parameters (overheads, number of processors, etc) to analyze and predict the performance of parallel programs. This section addresses the problem of measuring those and other important parameters, for a given shared memory machine. These parameters are not likely to be found in the manuals, since the combination of the operating system with the hardware is not usually documented (it depends for instance, on the underlying compiler). In this section we use a specific multicore parallel machine called MC, however the proposed methods should work for other machines as well.