Asserting the utility of CO2P3S using the Cowichan Problem Set

Parallel programming environments provide a way for programmers to reap the benefits of parallelism, while reducing the effort required to create parallel applications. The CO2P3S parallel programming system is one such tool that uses a pattern-based approach to express concurrency. Using the Cowichan Problems, we demonstrate that CO2P3S contains a rich set of parallel patterns for implementing a wide variety of applications running on shared-memory or distributed-memory hardware. An example of these parallel patterns, the Search-Tree pattern, is described and it is shown how the pattern was used to solve the Fifteen Puzzle problem. Code metrics and performance results are presented for the Cowichan applications to show the usability of the CO2P3S system and its ability to reduce programming effort, while producing programs with reasonable performance.