CS267 Assignment 3 Results: "Fun" with Titanium and UPC

Groups

CG: Armando Solar-Lezama, Mark Hoemmen, Christian Zambrana Rojas, Ben Schwarz, Guan Yang, and Fabrizio Bisetti.
Titanium, UPC
FT: Christian Bell, Hormozd Gahvari, Jeffrey Hammel, Rajesh Nishtala, Jimmy Su, and Michael Tung..
Titanium, UPC (additional UPC writeup
IS: Dan Adkins, Mikhail Avrekh, Omair Kamil, Bejamin Lee, Shariq Rizvi, Sonesh Surana.
Titanium, UPC
Knapsack: Amir Kamil, Meling Ngo, Yatish Patel, Frank Gennari, Guillermo Díez-Cañas, and Chen Chang.
Titanium, UPC, report in PostScript

Overall Comments

The UPC bugs that stymied many groups are partially fixed three months later. Given the time crunch and tool problems, each group did quite well. The CG and FT groups discovered that the problems were "too easy" for UPC and Titanium; little was gained from their globally addressable memory paradigm. IS and Knapsack had potential gains, but they were limited by back-end performance.

Every group found implicit communication more difficult to tune and analyze than explicit communication. Most of their execution times were dedicated to communication. Hiding the execution time in implicit actions frustrated attempts to tune, much like cache effects interfere with tuning sequential programs.