Abstract

This paper discusses an experiment to compare the usability of two parallel programming systems (PPS). In this experiment, half of the students in a graduate parallel and distributed computing course solved a problem using the Enterprise PPS while the other half solved the same problem using a PVM-like library of message-passing routines. The feedback from such experiments is necessary to help narrow the gap between what parallel programmers want, and what current PPSs provide. 1 Introduction A large number of software systems have been developed to simplify the task of developing parallel software. At one extreme, some of these systems support specialized programming models that allow programmers to quickly achieve high performance for selected applications. Unfortunately, this high performance cannot be matched across all classes of applications. Other systems provide a set of low-level primitives that allow the programmer to achieve high performance for many applications, but at t...

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