EXPERIENCES ON PARALLELIZING COMPILATION FOR DEVELOPMENT AND PORTING OF LARGE SCALE APPLICATIONS ON DISTRIBUTED MEMORY PARALLEL SYSTEMS∗

parallel applications and porting of legacy codes to parallel architectures have not yet gained a broad acceptance and diffusion. Common objections claim difficulty of performance tuning, limitation of its application to regular, data parallel computations, and lack of robustness of parallelizing HPF compilers in handling large sized codes. We have adopted the HPF approach in porting three different applications, performing plasma and molecular dynamics simulation, developed at the Italian National Agency for New Technology, Energy and the Environment (ENEA). We report in this paper our experiences gained during this effort, providing a case study for testing the suitability of the HPF approach to achieve the target of an easy and effective parallelization (or parallel development) and maintenance of real, large sized scientific applications