Abstract

A method is presented for incremental development of high performance parallel programs, using an application from molecular dynamics as a case study. The method uses the technique of overhead analysis, which aims to explain experimental observations using models of execution behaviour, as a means of determining successive steps in program development. The case study illustrates how this technique can be applied to the complexities of real-world parallel computations. 1 Introduction Parallel computers have so far failed to fulfil their promise of providing cheap high performance computing. In part, this is due to the high cost of software development required to find an acceptable implementation of an application which runs efficiently on a given parallel system: this has been termed the `best' implementation problem [4]. Execution time is, in general, unpredictable and, often, decisions made early in the development process have profound effects on the ultimate performance of an ap...

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