In this experimental study, we apply the technique of program unification to priority queues. We examine the performance of a variety of unified priority queue implementations on a Cray Y-MP. The scope of the study is restricted to determining if different implementations of priority queues exhibit markedly different performance characteristics under program unification. We found this to be true. In a larger view, this result has interesting consequences in the application of program unification to discrete event simulations on vector or SIMD machines. We find the heap to be a promising data structure in the program unification paradigm.

Program unification is a technique for source‐to‐source transformation of code for enhanced execution performance on vector and SIMD architectures. This work focuses on simple examples of program unification to explain the methodology and demonstrate its promise as a practical technique for improved performance. Using simple examples to explain how unification is done, we outline two experiments in the simulation domain that benefit from unification, namely Monte Carlo and discrete‐event simulation. Empirical tests of unified code on a Cray Y‐MP multiprocessor show that unification improves execution performance by a factor of roughly 8 for given application. The technique is general in that it can be applied to computation‐intensive programs in various data‐parallel application domains.