Productivity and performance through components: the ASCI Sweep3D application.

This paper is a case study of the effectiveness of component-oriented development for enhancing both productivity and performance for parallel programs. A process for converting monolithic applications into semantically composable components is described. The supporting software, the P-COM² compositional compiler, is briefly described. The componentized version of Sweep3D is described. Productivity is illustrated by composing different instances of the Sweep3D code through automated composition of components using P-COM². These instances, each of which targets improving performance for some execution environment or problem case, are examples of a family of instances which are composable from a modest set of components. It is found that customization of componentized codes by component-level adaptation may yield substantial performance improvement for specific execution environments. We identify and explain some of the benefits of component-oriented development for high-performance parallel systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]