U.S.-Austria Cooperative Research on Virtual Shared Memory for Distributed-Memory Machines (Computer Science)

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This award supports Professor Ken Kennedy and others in his group at Rice University to maintain collaboration in computer science research with Professor Hans Zima now of the University of Vienna. The Rice University team has been working for several years on a programming environment for distributed-memory machines as part of the "ParaScope" project. Simultaneously, Professor Zima has been building a similar static data partitioning system, called SUPERB, for the SUPRENUM project. During a sabbatical visit at Rice, the collaborators developed an enhanced system that moves toward dynamic partititioning that increases adaptability. Their design uses annotations to a FORTRAN program written in a data partitioning language. The user provides the annotation. The underlying compilation system then translates the FORTRAN program to a distributed memory program that employs the data assignment strategy specified by the annotations. Lack of efficient compiling programs for parallel and distributed hardware stands in the way of effective use of the new distributed computing resources by scientists in many disciplines. The principal research of the Rice group in this area is supported by an NSF grant to a Science and Technology Center there. Maintaining active collaboration with Professor Zima, now that he has returned to Europe, will be an inexpensive and valuable enhancement to the Texas-based work.