Adaptive parallel computing on heterogeneous networks with mpC

  • Authors:

  • Alexey Lastovetsky

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, University College Dublin (UCD), Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland

  • Venue:
  • Parallel Computing
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

The paper presents a new advanced version of the mpC parallel language. The language was designed specially for programming high-performance parallel computations on heterogeneous networks of computers.The advanced version allows the programmer to define at runtime all the main features of the underlying parallel algorithm, which have an impact on the application execution performance, namely, the total number of participating parallel processes, the total volume of computations to be performed by each of the processes, the total volume of data to be transferred between each pair of the processes, and how exactly the processes interact during the execution of the algorithm. Such an abstraction of parallel algorithm is called a network type in mpC.Given a network type, the programmer can define a network object of this type and describe in details all the computations and communications to be performed on the network object. The mpC programming system uses the information extracted from the network-type definition together with information about the actual performance of the executing network to map the processes of the parallel program to this network in such a way that leads to its better execution time.In addition, the programmer can use a special operator, time of, which predicts the total time of the algorithm execution on the underlying hardware without its real execution. That feature allows the programmer to write such a parallel program that can follow different parallel algorithms to solve the same problem, making choice at runtime depending on the particular executing network and its actual performance.The paper describes both the language model of parallel algorithm and the model of executing parallel environment used by the mpC programming system. It also discusses principles of the implementation of mapping mpC network objects to the computing network.