Mentat is an object-oriented parallel processing system that addresses
three problems endemic to parallel computing, the difficulty of writi
ng parallel programs, the difficulty achieving portability of those pr
ograms, and the difficulty exploiting contemporary heterogeneous archi
tectures. Mentat is a complete parallel application development enviro
nment consisting of the Mentat Programming Language (MPL) compiler, a
run-time system that supports dynamic data dependence detection, a com
plete post mortem debugger, resource management and accounting capabil
ities, and various utilities to aid the programmer and system administ
rator. This paper provides a basic introduction to the philosophy behi
nd Mentat and the MPL, and then focuses on application performance. Th
e objective is to give the reader insight into how Mentat performs on
different classes of applications. For each of four applications we sk
etch the implementation and present performance results.