Hi Russel, I did a pilot study along those lines a couple of years ago, attempting to compare performance with the Actor model, Transactional Memory and traditional mutex locking. (Not quite the precise distinctions you're looking for, but at least in a similar ballpark.) 17 subjects attempted a simple unstructured grid problem in an afternoon - measuring time taken, NCLOC, and subjective responses on a questionnaire afterwards.
The upshot was those metrics turned out to be pretty much completely uncorrelated (r^2 < 0.07 in all cases), and the only results to reach anything close to statistical significance on any metric were (1) that people completed tasks faster on the second trial, and (2) that people claimed to prefer the novel paradigms to mutex locking in the after-task questionnaires. The former is crushingly obvious, and the latter is subject to a number of obvious biases. (I also noticed an odd bifurication in finishing times - subjects either finished the task in half the time allotted or didn't manage it at all, but this is irrelevant to your question :) ) The paper is entitled "Empirically Investigating Parallel Programming Paradigms: A Null Result", and is available online at: http://ecs.victoria.ac.nz/twiki/pub/Events/PLATEAU/2009Programme/plateau09-luff.pdf To my knowledge, at the time of writing, there was no work published more recent or applicable to your query than the supercomputing studies I cited in the Related Work section. (There has been a more recent study of TM vs SMTL in an undergraduate-assignment setting - I don't have the reference but could grub it up for you if you wanted.) Meredydd On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 4:10 PM, Russel Winder <[email protected]> wrote: > Prompted by various discussions elsewhere, I am on the search for recent > experimental results and/or people doing or about to do experiments. > The questions all relate to the models of parallel software: > shared-memory multithreading, Actor Model, Dataflow Model, Communicating > Sequential Processes (CSP), data parallelism. > > Question 1 is: is synchronous message passing easier for programmers to > work with than asynchronous message passing. > > Question 2 is: are the case classes of Actor Model easier for > programmers to work with than the select statement of Dataflow Model and > CSP. > > There are more but those are the two "biggies". > > There is a lot of people who know precious little about psychology using > advocacy research out there building up various "known facts" about what > is and is not better from a cognitive perspective. Some of them base > this on observed anecdotal evidence which gives it some legitimacy, some > of them are peddling their own beliefs. > > So real experimental evidence from people who know what they are doing > would be most welcome. > > Thanks. > > -- > Russel. > ============================================================================= > Dr Russel Winder t: +44 20 7585 2200 voip: sip:[email protected] > 41 Buckmaster Road m: +44 7770 465 077 xmpp: [email protected] > London SW11 1EN, UK w: www.russel.org.uk skype: russel_winder > > > -- > The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an exempt > charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (SC 038302). > >
