TY - JOUR T1 - A pilot study to compare programming effort for two parallel programming models JF - Journal of Systems and Software Y1 - 2008 A1 - Hochstein, Lorin A1 - Basili, Victor R. A1 - Vishkin, Uzi A1 - Gilbert,John KW - effort KW - empirical study KW - Message-passing KW - MPI KW - parallel programming KW - PRAM KW - XMT AB - ContextWriting software for the current generation of parallel systems requires significant programmer effort, and the community is seeking alternatives that reduce effort while still achieving good performance. Objective Measure the effect of parallel programming models (message-passing vs. PRAM-like) on programmer effort. Design, setting, and subjects One group of subjects implemented sparse-matrix dense-vector multiplication using message-passing (MPI), and a second group solved the same problem using a PRAM-like model (XMTC). The subjects were students in two graduate-level classes: one class was taught MPI and the other was taught XMTC. Main outcome measures Development time, program correctness. Results Mean XMTC development time was 4.8 h less than mean MPI development time (95% confidence interval, 2.0–7.7), a 46% reduction. XMTC programs were more likely to be correct, but the difference in correctness rates was not statistically significant (p = .16). Conclusions XMTC solutions for this particular problem required less effort than MPI equivalents, but further studies are necessary which examine different types of problems and different levels of programmer experience. VL - 81 SN - 0164-1212 UR - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0164121208000125 CP - 11 M3 - 10.1016/j.jss.2007.12.798 ER -