P3ARSEC: Towards Parallel Patterns Benchmarking

High-level parallel programming is a de-facto standard approach to develop parallel software with reduced time to development. High-level abstractions are provided by existing frameworks as pragma-based annotations in the source code, or through pre-built parallel patterns that recur frequently in parallel algorithms, and that can be easily instantiated by the programmer to add a structure to the development of parallel software. In this paper we focus on this second approach and we propose P³ARSEC, a benchmark suite for parallel pattern-based frameworks consisting of a representative subset of PARSEC applications. We analyse the programmability advantages and the potential performance penalty of using such high-level methodology with respect to hand-made parallelisations using low-level mechanisms. The results are obtained on the new Intel Knights Landing multicore, and show a significantly reduced code complexity with comparable performance.