Programming the memory hierarchy revisited: supporting irregular parallelism in sequoia

  • Authors:

  • Michael Bauer;John Clark;Eric Schkufza;Alex Aiken

  • Affiliations:

  • Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 16th ACM symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

We describe two novel constructs for programming parallel machines with multi-level memory hierarchies: call-up, which allows a child task to invoke computation on its parent, and spawn, which spawns a dynamically determined number of parallel children until some termination condition in the parent is met. Together we show that these constructs allow applications with irregular parallelism to be programmed in a straightforward manner, and furthermore these constructs complement and can be combined with constructs for expressing regular parallelism. We have implemented spawn and call-up in Sequoia and we present an experimental evaluation on a number of irregular applications.