Performance programming with the Los Alamos macro accelerator
G.E. Cort · OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) · 1985
The CCC macro facility, as extended by Version 2.0 of Softool's Change and Configuration Control Environment, offers many new and powerful features. Among these are a vastly extended suite of commands, error trapping, and structured constructs. In concert with previously existing Version 1.x features (notably the very powerful symbol substitution and parameter passage facilities), these features combine to transform the macro facility from a simple command language into an extremely flexible programming language which is suitable for developing very large and complex applications. This paper presents the results of a performance analysis of the CCC macro facility conducted at the Los Alamos National Laboratory Weapons Neutron Research Facility. The goal of this work was to identify and evaluate major factors that can contribute to the degradation of performance of the CCC macro facility, and to develop strategies for countering their effects. In particular, we report on the Los Alamos Macro Accelerator, which can produce dramatic increases in execution speed for many applications.