suffers from memory contention which is overcome by the Distributed memory model. Parallel computing needs the special software for performing the parallel processing. MPI, OpenMp and PVM etc are the parallel software library for executing any parallel application. Some popular parallel bench marks are briefly discussed in this paper for measuring the performance of different types of parallel problems. Each benchmark is specific to each type of problem and thus a suitable benchmark would be chosen from Table 2 depending on the nature of the problem.