Multiple variants of many computations were tested, to see if undertaking an operation in a certain way had a significant impact on performance. In general, communications were expensive, especially reduction, although serial version speedups were usually quite respectable. By comparing speedups, we found that programs that scale well on one test machine will probably have acceptable if not optimal behavior on the other.
Introduction Migrating code to parallel machines can be a trying process.
Unless users have good software and know how to exploit it, the promise of enhanced performance may seem more like a mirage than a readily attainable goal. Unfamiliarity with parallel languages and how their implementations are likely to behave can be a major obstacle for many users. Their intent was to benchmark the performance of different HPF compilers on several computers to see how well HPF performed for a variety of implementations and platforms. For that reason, multiple variants of many computations were tested, to see if undertaking an operation in a certain way had a significant impact on performance. The number of iterations that could be performed in approximately 300 seconds of CPU time were counted.