Exploiting parallelism through directives on the nano-threads programming model

Abstract

The ability of an application to efficiently use the resources shared with other applications is a key feature needed to efficiently exploit the potential parallelism offered by nowadays multiprogrammed parallel architectures. In these environments, the application should be able to adapt the parallelism (kind and amount) that it is worth to be exploited to the global utilization of system resources. In this paper we present a programming model oriented to the hierarchical exploitation of unstructured parallelism in multiprogrammed shared-memory systems. The model offers a set of directives targetted to be used by Fortran programmers that allow them to express the parallelism of the application. The compiler is responsible for the generation of code that efficiently exploits and manages this parallelism at run time. The code generated runs on top of a user-level threads library that allow the program to decide and adapt himself to the parallelism that can be attained at any time.

This research has been supported by the Ministry of Education of Spain under contracts TIC-42995 and TIC-43994, ESPRIT project NANOS (21907) and by the CEPBA (European Center for Parallelism of Barcelona).