Examining the expert gap in parallel programming

Abstract

Parallel programming is often regarded as one of the hardest programming disciplines. On the one hand, parallel programs are notoriously prone to concurrency errors; and, while trying to avoid such errors, achieving program performance becomes a significant challenge. As a result of the multicore revolution, parallel programming has however ceased to be a task for domain experts only. And for this reason, a large variety of languages and libraries have been proposed that promise to ease this task. This paper presents a study to investigate whether such approaches succeed in closing the gap between domain experts and mainstream developers. Four approaches are studied: Chapel, Cilk, Go, and Threading Building Blocks (TBB). Each approach is used to implement a suite of benchmark programs, which are then reviewed by notable experts in the language. By comparing original and revised versions with respect to source code size, coding time, execution time, and speedup, we gain insights into the importance of expert knowledge when using modern parallel programming approaches. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.