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Pipelining Wavefront Computations: Experiences and Performance

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1800))

Abstract

Wavefront computations are common in scientific applications. Although it is well understood how wavefronts are pipelined for parallel execution, the question remains: How are they best presented to the compiler for the effective generation of pipelined code? We address this question through a quantitative and qualitative study of three approaches to expressing pipelining: programmer implemented via message passing, compiler discovered via automatic parallelization, and programmer defined via explicit parallel language features for pipelining. This work is the first assessment of the efficacy of these approaches in solving wavefront computations, and in the process, we reveal surprising characteristics of commercial compilers. We also demonstrate that a parallel language-level solution simplifies development and consistently performs well.

This research was supported in part by DARPA Grant F30602-97-1-0152

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© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Lewis, E.C., Snyder, L. (2000). Pipelining Wavefront Computations: Experiences and Performance. In: Rolim, J. (eds) Parallel and Distributed Processing. IPDPS 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1800. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45591-4_35

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45591-4_35

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-67442-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45591-2

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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