Managing irregular remote accesses to distributed shared arrays in a bulk-synchronous parallel programming environment

Christoph W. Keßler

Proc. of CPC'01, 9th Int. Workshop on Compilers for Parallel Computers, Edinburgh, Scotland, July 2001, pp. 195-204.

Abstract:

NestStep is a parallel programming language for the BSP (bulk-synchronous parallel) programming model. In this paper we describe the concept of distributed shared arrays in NestStep and its implementation on top of MPI. In particular, we describe a novel method for run-time scheduling of irregular, direct remote accesses to sections of distributed shared arrays. Our method, which is fully parallelized, uses conventional two-sided message passing and thus avoids the overhead of a standard implementation of direct remote memory access based on one-sided communication. The main prerequisite is that the given program is structured in a BSP-compliant way.

Key words:

distributed shared memory, bulk-synchronous parallelism (BSP), direct remote memory access, array distribution, irregular parallel computation, runtime scheduling of communication.

Comments:

A revised version of this paper appeared 2004 in Concurrency and Computation-Practice and Experience, see [J8].

BibTeX:

@inproceedings{ Kessler-CPC01-Managing,
 author = {Christoph W. Kessler},
 title = {Managing irregular remote accesses
                 to distributed shared arrays\\
          in a bulk-synchronous parallel programming environment},
 booktitle = {Proc. 9th Int.\ Workshop on Compilers for Parallel Computers (CPC-2001)},
 location = {Edinburgh (Scotland)},
 year = 2001, month = jul,
 pages = {195--204}
}

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Christoph Kessler