Investigating the performance and productivity of DASH using the Cowichan problems

Abstract

DASH is a new realization of the PGAS (Partitioned Global Address Space) programming model in the form of a C++ template library. Instead of using a custom compiler, DASH provides expressive programming constructs using C++ abstraction mechanisms and offers distributed data structures and parallel algorithms that follow the concepts employed by the C++ standard template library (STL). In this paper we evaluate the performance and productivity of DASH by comparing our implementation of a set of benchmark programs with those developed by expert programmers in Intel Cilk, Intel TBB (Threading Building Blocks), Go and Chapel. We perform a comparison on shared memory multiprocessor systems ranging from moderately parallel multicore systems to a 64-core manycore system. We additionally perform a scalability study on a distributed memory system on up to 20 nodes (800 cores). Our results demonstrate that DASH offers productivity that is comparable with the best established programming systems for shared memory and also achieves comparable or better performance. Our results on multi-node systems show that DASH scales well and achieves excellent performance.