Evaluating the performance of a SISAL implementation of the abingdon cross image processing benchmark

Abstract

There are many paradigms being promoted and explored for programming parallel computers, including modified sequential languages, new imperative languages and applicative languages. SISAL is an applicative language which has been designed by a consortium of industrial and research organizations for the specification and execution of parallel programs. It allows programs to be written with little concern for the structure of the underlying machine, thus the programmer is free to explore different ways of expressing the parallelism. A major problem with applicative languages has been their poor efficiency at handling large data structures. To counter this problem SISAL includes some advanced memory management techniques for reducing the amount of data copying that occurs. In this paper we discuss the implementation of some image processing benchmarks in SISAL and C to evaluate the effectiveness of the memory management code. In general, the SISAL program was easier to code than the C (augmented with the PARMACS macros) because we were not concerned with the parallel implementation details. We found that the SISAL performance was in general comparable to C, and that it could be brought in line with an efficient parallel C implementation by some programmer-specified code transformations.