Architecture-independent parallelism for both shared- and distributed-memory machines using the Filaments package

This paper presents the Filaments package, which can be used to create architecture-independent parallel programs – that is, programs that are portable and efficient across vastly different parallel machines. Filaments virtualizes the underlying machine in terms of the number of processors and the i...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inParallel computing Vol. 26; no. 10; pp. 1297 - 1323
Main Authors Lowenthal, David K, Freeh, Vincent W
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Elsevier B.V 01.09.2000
Subjects
Architecture independence
Fine-grain parallelism
Fine-grain parallelism
Architecture independence
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Summary:This paper presents the Filaments package, which can be used to create architecture-independent parallel programs – that is, programs that are portable and efficient across vastly different parallel machines. Filaments virtualizes the underlying machine in terms of the number of processors and the interconnection, allowing fine-grain, shared-memory programs to be written or generated. Furthermore, Filaments uses a carefully designed API along with machine-specific runtime libraries and preprocessing that allow programs to run unchanged on both shared- and distributed-memory machines. Performance is not sacrificed, as almost all kernels and applications we tested achieve a speedup of over 4 on 8 processors of both an SGI Challenge and a cluster of Pentium Pros.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-2
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ISSN:0167-8191
1872-7336
DOI:10.1016/S0167-8191(00)00038-7