Evaluating High Level Parallel Programming Support for Irregular Applications in ICC++

Object-oriented techniques have been proffered as aids for managing complexity, enhancing reuse, and improving readability of irregular parallel applications. However, as performance is the major reason for employing parallelism, programmability and high performance must be delivered together. Using a suite of seven challenging irregular applications and the mature Illinois Concert system (a high-level concurrent object-oriented programming model backed by an aggressive implementation), we evaluate what programming efforts are required to achieve high performance. For all seven applications, we achieve performance comparable to the best reported for low-level programming means on large-scale parallel systems. In general, a high-level concurrent object-oriented programming model supported by aggressive implementation techniques can eliminate programmer management of many concerns -- procedure and computation granularity, namespace management, and low-level concurrency management. Our st..