This report describes translations of an existing sequential program to
the Charm parallel programming system and to the PVM parallel
programming library. Charm provides a rich set of data and execution
abstraction facilities, while PVM does not. One argument in favor of
abstraction facilities is that it is better to express an algorithm in
terms of the problem -- higher levels of abstraction promote algorithm
expression closer to the form of the problem not in terms of the
(machine) implementation. An argument against providing abstraction
facilities is that they introduce significant execution overhead.
Contrary to our expectations, experience translating our program
supports the conclusion that, compared to PVM, Charm's abstraction
facilities introduce no significant execution overhead, but that they
introduce a significant translation (programming) overhead.