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. 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 that is comparable to the best reported for low-level programming means on large-scale parallel systems. Our study indicates that procedure and computation granularity, namespace management, and low-level concurrency management can be fully automated for these applications. Decoupling these concerns makes managing the remaining fundamental concerns -- data locality and load balance -- much easier. These two require programmer input, which our system integrates cleanly into the programming interface. Overall, only small changes to the sequential code (fewer t..