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. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.