Tree-based algorithms for spatial domain applications scale poorly in the distributed setting without extensive experimentation and optimization. Reusability via well-designed parallel abstractions supported by efficient parallel algorithms is therefore desirable. We present ParaTreeT, a parallel tree toolkit for state-of-the-art performance and programmer productivity. ParaTreeT leverages a novel shared-memory software cache to reduce communication volume and idle time throughout traversal. By dividing particles and subtrees across processors independently, it improves decomposition and limits synchro-nization during tree build. Tree-node states are extracted from the particle set with the Data abstraction, and traversal work and pruning are defined by the Visitor abstraction. ParaTreeT provides built-in trees, decompositions, and traversals that offer application-specific customization. We demonstrate ParaTreeT's improved computational performance over even specialized codes with multiple applications on CPUs. We evaluate how several applications derive benefit from ParaTreeT's models while pro-viding new insights to these workloads through experimentation.

Modern compiler optimization is a complex process that offers no guarantees to deliver the fastest, most efficient target code. For this reason, compilers struggle to produce a stable performance from versions of code that carry out the same computation and only differ in the order of operations. This instability makes compilers much less effective program optimization tools and often forces programmers to carry out a brute force search when tuning for performance. In this paper, we analyze the stability of the compilation process and the performance headroom of three widely used general purpose compilers: GCC, ICC, and Clang. For the study, we extracted over 1,000 for loop nests from well-known benchmarks, libraries, and real applications; then, we applied sequences of source-level loop transformations to these loop nests to create numerous semantically equivalent mutations ; finally, we analyzed the impact of transformations on code quality in terms of locality, dynamic instruction count, and vectorization. Our results show that, by applying source-to-source transformations and searching for the best vectorization setting, the percentage of loops sped up by at least 1.15x is 46.7% for GCC, 35.7% for ICC, and 46.5% for Clang, and on average the potential for performance improvement is estimated to be at least 23.7% for GCC, 18.1% for ICC, and 26.4% for Clang. Our stability analysis shows that, under our experimental setup, the average coefficient of variation of the execution time across all mutations is 18.2% for GCC, 19.5% for ICC, and 16.9% for Clang, and the highest coefficient of variation for a single loop nest reaches 118.9% for GCC, 124.3% for ICC, and 110.5% for Clang. We conclude that the evaluated compilers need further improvements to claim they have stable behavior.