A preliminary empirical study to compare MPI and OpenMP productivity

Context: The rise of multicore is bringing shared-memory parallelism to the masses. The community is struggling to identify which parallel models are most productive. Objective: Measure the effect of MPI and OpenMP models on programmer productivity. Design: One group of programmers solved the sharks and fishes problem using MPI and a second group solved the same problem using OpenMP, then each programmer switched models and solved the same problem again. The participants were graduate students in an HPC course. Measures: Development effort (hours), program correctness (grades), program performance (speedup versus serial implementation). Results: Mean OpenMP development time was 9.6 hours less than MPI (95% CI, 0.37− 19 hours), a 43% reduction. No statistically significant difference was observed in assignment grades. MPI performance was better than OpenMP performance for 4 out of the 5 students that submitted correct implementations for both models. Conclusions: OpenMP solutions for this problem required less effort than MPI, but insufficient power to measure the effect on correctness. The performance data was insufficient to draw strong conclusions but suggests that unoptimized MPI programs perform better than unoptimized OpenMP programs, even with a similar parallelization strategy. Further studies are necessary to examine different programming problems, models, and levels of programmer experience.