A Comparison of Automatic Parallelization Tools/Compilers on the SGI Origin 2000

Abstract

Porting applications to new high performance parallel and distributed computing platforms is a challenging task. Since writing parallel code by hand is time consuming and costly, porting codes would ideally be automated by using some parallelization tools and compilers. In this paper, we compare the performance of three parallelization tools and compilers based on the NAS Parallel Benchmark and a CFD application, ARC3D, on the SGI Origin2000 multiprocessor. The tools and compilers compared include: 1) CAPTools: an interactive computer aided parallelization toolkit, 2) Portland Group's HPF compiler, and 3) the MIPSPro FORTRAN compiler available on the Origin2000, with support for shared memory multiprocessing directives and MP runtime library. The tools and compilers are evaluated in four areas: 1) required user interaction, 2) limitations, 3) portability and 4) performance. Based on these results, a discussion on the feasibility of computer-aided parallelization of aerospace applications is presented along with suggestions for future work.