HPF to OpenMP on the Origin2000: a case study

The geophysics group at CRS4 has long developed echo reconstruction codes in HPF on distributed‐memory machines. Now, however, with the arrival of shared‐memory machines and their native OpenMP compilers, the transfer to OpenMP would seem to present the logical next step in our code development strategy. Recent experience with porting one of our important HPF codes to OpenMP does not bear this out—at least not on the Origin2000. The OpenMP code suffers from the immaturity of the standard, and the operating system's handling of UNIX threads seems to severely penalize OpenMP performance. On the other hand, the HPF code on the Origin2000 is fast, scalable and not disproportionately sensitive to load on the machine. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.