An experimental assessment of Express parallel programming environment

This paper describes a performance evaluation study of Express programming environment on the iPSC/860 hypercube computer. Express allows parallel programs to be developed in a completely portable fashion and is available on most commercially available parallel computers as well as networks of workstations. We have developed a set of benchmarks to make a comprehensive performance assessment of the frequently used communication primitives of Express on hypercube computers. A comparison with the equivalent iPSC/860 primitives is also carried out. In addition, we have developed and benchmarked a suite of applications including three different versions of Gaussian elimination, fast Fourier transform, and the N-body problem. These results help us evaluate the performance of Express and judge its merits against the extra overhead incurred due to portability, and can be useful for designing new generations of portable programming environments. Furthermore, algorithm developers can benefit from these results by using the times required by the basic communication primitives on the iPSC/860 system with and without Express, and can automate performance estimation by using these timings