Parallel for loop and parallel reduction: an SMP comparison of four languages

Parallel for loop, a typical example of task parallelism assigns different iterations of the loop to different tasks. In combination with parallel reduction, it is a handy, yet powerful construct for the programmer. We give a joint evaluation of these constructs, under four recent parallel processing languages / libraries on a Symmetric Multi- Processing (SMP) system. The problem used for benchmarking is the evaluation of Pi (pi) using trapezoidal rule on the derivative of arc tangent. OpenMP, one of the de- facto standards for shared memory multiprocessing, is found to be the best, on a quad core 64- bit processor on Linux platform. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.