The current trend of multicore architectures on shared memory systems
underscores the need of parallelism. While there are some programming model to
express parallelism, thread programming model has become a standard to support
these system such as OpenMP, and POSIX threads. MPI (Message Passing Interface)
which remains the dominant model used in high-performance computing today faces
this challenge.

Previous version of MPI which is MPI-1 has no shared memory concept, and
Current MPI version 2 which is MPI-2 has a limited support for shared memory
systems. In this research, MPI-2 version of MPI will be compared with OpenMP to
see how well does MPI perform on multicore / SMP (Symmetric Multiprocessor)
machines.

Comparison between OpenMP for thread programming model and MPI for message
passing programming model will be conducted on multicore shared memory machine
architectures to see who has a better performance in terms of speed and
throughput. Application used to assess the scalability of the evaluated
parallel programming solutions is matrix multiplication with customizable
matrix dimension.

Many research done on a large scale parallel computing which using high scale
benchmark such as NSA Parallel Benchmark (NPB) for their testing standarization
[1]. This research will be conducted on a small scale parallel computing that
emphasize more on the performance evaluation between MPI and OpenMPI parallel
programming model using self created benchmark.