Towards a portable and efficient environment for parallel computing

The availability of more and more cost-effective and powerful parallel computers has enhanced the ability of the operations research community to solve more laborious computational problems. In this paper an attempt has been made to implement a parallel simulation runs dispatcher with an objective to study the feasibility of establishing a portable and efficient parallel programming environment. This parallel simulation run dispatcher can be applied to both terminating type and steady-state type simulation models. The algorithm is then transferred and executed on various other shared-memory multiprocessor systems to illustrate its portability. Another contribution of this paper is to verify whether the performance of the portable code and the non-portable code of a same algorithm is significantly different on a specific parallel system using the analysis of covariance model.