Abstractions for portable, scalable parallel programming (original) (raw)
1998, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
In parallel programming, the need to manage communication costs, load imbalance, and irregularities in the computation puts substantial demands on the programmer. Key properties of the architecture, such as the number of processors and the costs of communication, must be exploited to achieve good performance. Coding these properties directly into a program compromises the portability and exibility of the code because signicant changes are usually needed to port or enhance the program. We describe a parallel programming model that supports the concise, independent description of key aspects of a parallel program|such as data distribution, communication, and boundary conditions|without reference to machine idiosyncrasies. The independence of such components improves portability by allowing the components of a program to be tuned independently, and encourages reuse by supporting the composition of existing components. The architecture-sensitive aspects of a computation are isolated from the rest of the program, reducing the need to make extensive changes to port a program. This model is eective in exploiting both data parallelism and functional parallelism. This paper provides programming examples, compares this work to related languages, and presents performance results.
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