Abstract. The ability of system software to detect and issue error messages that help programmers quickly fix serial and parallel run-time errors is an important productivity criterion for developing and maintaining application programs. Over ten thousand run-time error tests and a run-time error detection (RTED) evaluation tool has been developed for the automatic evaluation of run-time error detection capabilities for serial errors and for parallel errors in MPI, OpenMP and UPC programs. Evaluation results, tests and the RTED evaluation tool are freely available at http://rted.public.iastate.edu. Many compilers, tools and run-time systems scored poorly on these tests. The authors make recommendations for providing better RTED in the future.

Abstract-The ability of system software to detect run-time errors and issue messages that help programmers quickly fix these errors is an important productivity criterion for developing and maintaining application programs. To evaluate this capability for Unified Parallel C (UPC), over two thousand run-time error tests and a run-time error detection (RTED) evaluation tool have been developed. For each error message issued, the RTED evaluation tool assigns a score from 0 to 5 based on the usefulness of the information in the message to help a programmer quickly fix the error. The RTED evaluation tool calculates averages over each error category and then prints the results. All tests and the RTED evaluation tool are freely available at the RTED web site http://rted.public.iastate.edu/UPC. The Cray, Berkeley, HP and GNU UPC compilers have been evaluated and results posted on this same web site.

Many scientific codes can achieve significant performance improvement when executed on a computer equipped with a vector processor. Vector constructs in source code should be recognized by a vectorizing compiler or preprocessor. This paper discusses, from a general point of view, how a vectorizing compiler/preprocessor can be evaluated. The areas discussed include data dependence analysis, IF loop analysis, nested loops, loop interchanging, loop collapsing, indirect addressing, use of temporary storage, and order of arithmetic. The ideas presented are based on vectorization of over a million lines of production codes and an extensive test suite developed to evaluate preprocessors under varying degrees of code complexity. Areas for future research are also discussed.

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