Portable Performance of Data Parallel Languages

A portable program yields consistent performance on different platforms. We study the portable performance of three NAS benchmarks compiled with three commercial HPF compilers on the IBM SP2. Each benchmark is evaluated using DO loops and F90 constructs. Base-line comparison is provided by Fortran/MPI and ZPL. The HPF results show some scalable performance but indicate a considerable portability problem. First, relying on the compiler alone for extensive analysis and optimization leads to unpredictable performance. Second, differences in the parallelization strategies often require compiler specific customization. The results suggest that the foremost criteria for portability is a concise performance model.