The Paderborn University BSP (PUB) library
Parallel Computing
Efficient Barrier Synchronization Mechanism for the BSP Model on Message-Passing Architectures
IPPS '98 Proceedings of the 12th. International Parallel Processing Symposium on International Parallel Processing Symposium
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Abstract Communication and synchronization stand as the dual bottlenecks in the performance of parallel systems, and especially those that attempt to alleviate the programming burden by incurring overhead in these two domains. We formulate the notions of communicable memory and lazy barriers to help achieve efficient communication and synchronization. These concepts are developed in the context of BSPk, a toolkit library for programming networks of workstations---and other distributed memory architectures in general---based on the Bulk Synchronous Parallel (BSP) model. BSPk, whose design is the subject of this paper, emphasizes efficiency in communication by minimizing local memory-to-memory copying, and in barrier synchronization by not forcing a process to wait unless it needs remote data. Both the message passing (MP) and distributed shared memory (DSM) programming styles are supported in BSPk, for the former helps processes exchange short-lived unnamed data values, while the latter permits communication through long-lived named variables.