Information hiding in parallel programs: model and experimental evaluation on the Connection Machine

An approach for incorporating information hiding within parallel software components is developed. The loss of performance is overcome by having intracomponent encapsulation layers, massive state transition operations, multiple-entry data structures, and program transformation. The approach was experimentally evaluated for three types of objects and application programs on a Connection Machine (CM-2). The results indicate that the approach can reduce the loss of performance due to information hiding. The results indicate that there is some loss of performance for the sorted-array implementation of the set object. Also, the performance of the hash data structure was much worse than expected. Hardware message queues would greatly improve the performance.<>