High Performance Computing Applications Using Parallel Data Processing Units

• Published in: Fundamentals of Software Engineering Vol. 9392; pp. 191 - 206
• Main Authors: Azadbakht, Keyvan, Serbanescu, Vlad, de Boer, Frank
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2015; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Actor Based Implementation; Artificial intelligence; Computer programming / software development; Data Management; High Performance Computing; Multicore Processors; Programming Construct; Shared Memory; Software Engineering
• ISBN: 9783319246437; 3319246437
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-24644-4_13

Multicore processors are growing with respect to the number of cores on a chip. In a parallel computation context, multicore platforms have several important features such as exploiting multiple parallel processes, having access to a shared memory with noticeably lower cost than the distributed alternative and optimizing different levels of parallelism. In this paper, we introduce the Parallel Data Processing Unit (PDPU) which is a group of objects that benefits from the shared memory of the multicore configuration and that consists of two parts: a shared memory for maintaining data consistent, and a set of objects that are processing the data, then producing and aggregating the results concurrently. We then implement two examples in Java that illustrate PDPU behavior, and compare them with their actor based counterparts and show significant performance improvements. We also put forward the idea of integrating PDPU with the actor model which will result in an optimization for a specific spectrum of problems in actor based development.