CSR: Small: Fluid Communication for Parallel Programs

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Every aspect of parallel software development is more complicated than forserial programs. This research focuses on one of the primary sources ofcomplexity: intra-application communication. Currently it is a programmer'sresponsibility to find an efficient mapping of their application'scommunication patterns onto the communication infrastructure of the targetsystem. This research flips that responsibility by developing a flexiblecommunication architecture and associated tools and algorithms that allow thetarget platform to be specialized for a particular application, rather thanvice versa. In addition to reducing the programmer's burden, specializationhas the potential to improve communication efficiency while the automatedtechniques can increase portability. This research poses questions whose answers have consequences at severallevels of the traditional system stack: Can programmers be freed fromhardware-specific optimization of communication without degrading performance?What abstractions are needed to allow hardware to adapt to the programmer,rather than the other way around? Can communication efficiency be improvedwhen running on an application-specific communication platform? The projectanswers these questions by exploring abstractions and algorithms to profile aparallel program's communication, synthesize a custom network design, andimplement it in a configurable network architecture substrate. The researchmethods center around the X10 language, and include compiler instrumentationpasses, offline communication profile analyses, development of a portablenetwork intermediate representation, and network place and route softwarealgorithms.