Concert System Performance
There have been numerous performance studies described in a variety of
technical papers, but the basic
isses are sequential and parallel performance.
Sequential Performance: Livermore Kernels
To quantify the sequential performance of the Concert system, we
reimplemented the Livermore Kernels in our concurrent object-oriented
programming model. Each array is a concurrent object, so all array
accesses are virtual function calls (before optimization). The performance
comparison against C is shown below:
Concert achieves performance parity on over half of the
twenty-four kernels. On the remaining kernels, the C program is
faster for a few, and Concert is faster for a few. Note that the
performance achieved by the Concert compiler is much better than that
achieved by most Unix C++ compilers. For more details on the
optimizations to achieve these results see our POPL '95 paper. For a performance comparison which involves more object-oriented programs, see a recently submitted paper.
Parallel Performance: Parallel Molecular Dynamics
To quantify the parallel performance of the Concert system, we have
built several application codes, including a parallel molecular
dynamics code, (IC-CEDAR), based on the well-known CEDAR code (Crystal
Energy Dynamics and Refinement) developed by Jan Hermanns at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The algorithms embodied
in the parallel version of the code are identical to the sequential
version with one exception; SHAKE continuity constraint algorithm was
parallelized with a multi-color scheme. All phases of the application
are parallelized. The figure below compares the performance of
IC-CEDAR to UHGROMOS a parallel FORTRAN code, using the same
parameter settings.
The performance numbers show that IC-CEDAR can achieve comparable to
superior performance to competing approaches. Further the efficiency
of the object-oriented programming model can match that of more
traditional procedural models such as Fortran. A more detailed performance comparison
against CHARMM is available.
Last updated January 11,1999
Andrew A. Chien
webmaster