An Evaluation of High Performance Fortran Compilers Using the HPFBench Benchmark Suite

The High Performance Fortran (HPF) benchmark suite HPFBench was designed for evaluating the HPF language and compilers on scalable architectures. The functionality of the benchmarks covers scientific software library functions and application kernels. In this paper, we report on an evaluation of two commercial HPF compilers, namely, xlhpf from IBM and pghpf from PGI, on an IBM SP2 using the linear algebra subset of the HPFBench benchmarks. Our evaluation shows that, on a single processor, there is a significant overhead for the codes compiled under the two HPF compilers and their Fortran 90 companions, compared with the sequential versions of the codes compiled using xlf. The difference mainly comes from the difference in code segments corresponding to the communications when running in parallel. When running in parallel, codes compiled under pghpf achieve from slightly to significantly better speedups than when compiled under xlhpf. The difference is mainly from better performance of communications such as cshift, spread, sum and gather/scatter under pghpf.