Portability of Parallel and Distributed Applications: Is it possible to build a portable and scalable parallel application?

Portability has become an important consideration in parallel application design. The word portable, or portability, has been widely and often used in the parallel processing community. However, there is no adequate, commonly accepted definition of portability evaluation available. Portability evaluation of parallel application is difficult to quantify, evaluate, and compare. This work is an attempt to establish a framework called Scalable Portability Evaluation Methodology (SPEM) for analyzing the parallel portability. The novelty of SPEM methodology is in its ability to compare, evaluate, and analyze the parallel portability over different applications and architecture. Portable speedup and efficiency metrics are defined and function as the basis for the definition of a new parallel portability metric called Portability Degree (PD). Based on the new metric, the Scalable Portability (SP) approach to analyze portability of a parallel system is formally defined.