Toward abstracting the communication intent in applications to improve portability and productivity

Tiffany M. Mintz, Oscar Hernandez, Christos Kartsaklis, David E. Bernholdt, Markus Eisenbach, Swaroop Pophale

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Programming with communication libraries such as the Message Passing Interface (MPI) obscures the high-level intent of the communication in an application and makes static communication analysis difficult to do. Compilers are unaware of communication libraries' specifics, leading to the exclusion of communication patterns from any automated analysis and optimizations. To overcome this, communication patterns can be expressed at higher-levels of abstraction and incrementally added to existing MPI applications. In this paper, we propose the use of directives to clearly express the communication intent of an application in a way that is not specific to a given communication library. Our communication directives allow programmers to express communication among processes in a portable way, giving hints to the compiler on regions of computations that can be overlapped with communication and relaxing communication constraints on the ordering, completion and synchronization of the communication imposed by specific libraries such as MPI. The directives can then be translated by the compiler into message passing calls that efficiently implement the intended pattern and be targeted to multiple communication libraries. Thus far, we have used the directives to express point-to-point communication patterns in C, C++ and Fortran applications, and have translated them to MPI and SHMEM.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - IEEE 27th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops and PhD Forum, IPDPSW 2013
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages385-393
Number of pages9
ISBN (Print)9780769549798
DOIs
StatePublished - 2013
Event2013 IEEE 37th Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference, COMPSAC 2013 - Boston, MA, Japan
Duration: Jul 22 2013Jul 26 2013

Publication series

NameProceedings - IEEE 27th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops and PhD Forum, IPDPSW 2013

Conference

Conference2013 IEEE 37th Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference, COMPSAC 2013
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityBoston, MA
Period07/22/1307/26/13

Keywords

  • communication
  • directives
  • global address space
  • parallel computing
  • passing
  • remote data transfer
  • scientific computing

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