Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Portable parallel irregular applications

  • Irregular Data Structures and Applications
  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Book cover Parallel Symbolic Languages and Systems (PSLS 1995)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1068))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Software developers for distributed memory multiprocessors often complain about the lack of libraries and tools for developing and performance tuning their applications. While some tools exist for regular array-based computations, support for applications with pointer-based data structures, asynchronous communication patterns, or unpredictable computational costs is seriously lacking. In this paper we describe our experience with six irregular applications from CAD, Robotics, Genetics, Physics, and Computer Science, and offer them as application challenges for other systems that support irregular applications. The applications vary in the amount and kind of irregularity. We characterize their irregularity profiles and the implementation problems that arise from those profiles. In addition to performance, one of our goals is to provide implementations that run efficiently with minimal performance tuning across machine platforms, and our designs are influenced by this desire for performance portability. Each of our applications is organized around one or two distributed data structures, which are part of the Multipol data structure library. We describe these data structures, give an overview of some key features in our underlying runtime support, and present performance results for the applications on three platforms.

This work was supported in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense under contracts DABT63-92-C-0026 and F30602-95-C-0136, by the Department of Energy grant DE-FG03-94ER25206, and by the National Science Foundation grants CCR-9210260, CDA-8722788, and CDA-9401156. The information presented here does not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the Government and no official endorsement should be inferred.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Andrew A. Chien. Concurrent Aggregates: Supporting Modularity in Massively-Parallel Programs. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993.

    Google Scholar 

  2. S. B. Baden. Programming Abstractions for Dynamically Partitioning and Coordinating Localized Scientific Calculations Running on Multiprocessors. SIAM J. Sci. Stat. Comput., 12(1):145–157, 1991.

    Google Scholar 

  3. F. Bodin, P. Beckman, D. Gannon, S. Yang, S. Kesavan, A. Maloney, and B. Mohr. Implementing a Parallel C++ Runtime System for Scalable Parallel System. In Supercomputing '93, pages 588–597, Portland, Oregon, November 1993.

    Google Scholar 

  4. Robert D. Blumofe and Charles E. Leiserson. Scheduling Multithreaded Computations by Work Stealing. In Thirty-Fifth Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS '94), pages 356–368, November 1994.

    Google Scholar 

  5. Peter Carlin, Mani Chandy, and Carl Kesselman. The Compositional C++ Language Definition. Technical Report CS-TR-92-02, California Institute of Technology, 1992.

    Google Scholar 

  6. David E. Culler, Andrea Dusseau, Seth Copen Goldstein, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Steven Lumetta, Thorsten von Eicken, and Katherine Yelick. Parallel Programming in Split-C. In Supercomputing '93, pages 262–273, Portland, Oregon, November 1993.

    Google Scholar 

  7. J. Choi, J. Dongarra, R. Pozo, and D. Walker. ScaLAPACK: A Scalable Linear Algebra Library for Distributed Memory Concurrent Computers. In Symposium on the Frontiers of Massively Parallel Computation, McLean, VA, October 1992.

    Google Scholar 

  8. K. M. Chandy and J. Misra. Asynchronous Distributed Simulation via a Sequence of Parallel Computations. Communications of the ACM, 24(11), April 1981.

    Google Scholar 

  9. Soumen Chakrabarti, Abhiram Ranade, and Katherine Yelick. Randomized Load Balancing for Tree-structured Computation. In Proceedings of the Scalable High Performance Computing Conference, Knoxville, TN, May 1994.

    Google Scholar 

  10. D. Culler, A. Sah, K. Schauser, T. von Eicken, and J. Wawrzynek. Fine-grain Parallelism with Minimal Hardware Support: A Compiler-Controlled Threaded Abstract Machine. In Proc. of 4th Int. Conf. on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Santa-Clara, CA, April 1991. (Also available as Technical Report UCB/CSD 91/594, CS Div., University of California at Berkeley).

    Google Scholar 

  11. Soumen Chakrabarti and Katherine Yelick. Implementing an Irregular Application on a Distributed Memory Multiprocessor. In Proceedings of the 1993 Conference on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming, San Diego, CA, May 1993.

    Google Scholar 

  12. Soumen Chakrabarti and Katherine Yelick. On the Correctness of a Distributed Memory Gröbner Basis Computation. In Rewriting Techniques and Applications, Montreal, Canada, June 1993.

    Google Scholar 

  13. Soumen Chakrabarti and Katherine Yelick. Distributed Data Structures and Algorithms for Gröbner Basis Computation. Lisp and Symbolic Computation, 1994.

    Google Scholar 

  14. J. Demmel, I. Dhillon, and H. Ren. On the Correctness of Parallel Bisection in Floating Point. Tech Report UCB//CSD-94-805, UC Berkeley Computer Science Division, March 1994. available via anonymous ftp from tr-ftp.cs.berkeley.edu, in directory pub/tech-reports/csd/csd-94-805, file all.ps.

    Google Scholar 

  15. Raja Das, Mustafa Uysal, Joel Saltz, and Yuan-Shin Hwang. Communication Optimizations for Irregular Scientific Computations on Distributed Memory Architectures. Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, September 1994.

    Google Scholar 

  16. J.A. Feldman, C.C. Lim, and T. Rauber. The Shared-memory Language pSather on a Distributed-memory Multiprocessor. In Workshop on Languages, Compilers and Run-Time Environments for Distributed Memory Multiprocessors. Boulder, CO, September 1992.

    Google Scholar 

  17. Jeff Jones. Exploiting Parallelism in the Perfect Phylogeny Computation. Master's thesis. University of California, Berkeley, Computer Science Division, December 1994.

    Google Scholar 

  18. J. Jones and K. Yelick. Parallelizing the Phylogeny Problem. In Supercomputing '95, December 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  19. Arvind Krishnamurthy and Katherine Yelick. Optimizing parallel SPMD programs. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing, August 1994.

    Google Scholar 

  20. Wei Shu and L.V. Kalé. Chare kernel — a runtime support system for parallel computations. Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, 11:198–211, 1991.

    Google Scholar 

  21. Daniel J. Scales and Monica S. Lam. A flexible shared memory system for distributed memory machines. Unpublished manuscript, 1993.

    Google Scholar 

  22. Stephen Steinberg. Parallelizing a cell simulation: Analysis, abstraction, and portability. Master's thesis, University of California, Berkeley, Computer Science Division, December 1994.

    Google Scholar 

  23. Chih-Po Wen, Soumen Chakrabarti, Etienne Deprit, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and Katherine Yelick. Runtime Support for Portable Distributed Data Structures. In Third Workshop on Languages, Compilers, and Run-Time Systems for Scalable Computers (LCR), May 1995. Boleslaw K. Szymanski and Balaram Sinharoy (Editors), Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, MA, pp. 111–120.

    Google Scholar 

  24. Chih-Po Wen. Parallel Timing Simulation on a Distributed Memory Multiprocessor. Master's thesis, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 1992.

    Google Scholar 

  25. Chih-Po Wen. Portable Library Support for Irregular Applications. PhD thesis, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  26. Chih-Po Wen and Katherine Yelick. Parallel Timing Simulation on a Distributed Memory Multiprocessor. In International Conference on CAD, Santa Clara, CA, November 1993.

    Google Scholar 

  27. Chih-Po Wen and Katherine Yelick. Portable Runtime Support for Asynchronous Simulation. In International Conference on Parallel Processing, Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, August 1995.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Division, U.C. Berkeley, USA

    Katherine Yelick, Chih-Po Wen, Soumen Chakrabarti, Etienne Deprit, Jeff Jones & Arvind Krishnamurthy

Authors
  1. Katherine Yelick
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Chih-Po Wen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Soumen Chakrabarti
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Etienne Deprit
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Jeff Jones
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Arvind Krishnamurthy
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Takayasu Ito Robert H. Halstead Jr. Christian Queinnec

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Yelick, K., Wen, CP., Chakrabarti, S., Deprit, E., Jones, J., Krishnamurthy, A. (1996). Portable parallel irregular applications. In: Ito, T., Halstead, R.H., Queinnec, C. (eds) Parallel Symbolic Languages and Systems. PSLS 1995. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1068. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0023060

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0023060

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-61143-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-68332-2

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation