A Software Environment for High-Performance Parallel Computing

在高性能MIMD架构在 生产科学、工程和商业应用， 困扰当前系统的三个编程问题必须是 解决了 首先，手工编写并行程序是非常困难的。 难 程序员必须管理通信， 同步和调度成千上万的 独立的进程。 正确管理的负担 环境常常会使程序员感到困惑。 二是一旦 在特定的MIMD架构上实现， 代码通常不能在其它MIMD体系结构上使用， 这需要大量的努力来港口。 这阻碍 因为新的体系结构 如此频繁地介绍。 三是没有软件支持 用于在异构“Meta”上透明地执行应用， 系统”由各种高性能 建筑 这一建议解决了所有这三个问题。 我们有 他用门泰特攻击了前两个，门泰特是一种易于使用的物体， 面向并行处理系统，由该大学开发 弗吉尼亚州。 我们计划测试门泰特方法的有效性 在各种平台上的一组真实的应用程序上。 的 目标是确定门泰特是否容易在真实的上使用 应用程序和衡量性能。 我们处理 第三个问题是进化的。 我们将把门泰特扩展到 异构环境，并使用扩展门泰特作为测试- 元系统实验的温床 基于实验 结果，一个原型元系统，提供了一个易于使用， 将为用户构造高性能抽象。

Before high-performance MIMD architectures become commonplace in production scientific, engineering, and business applications, three programming problems that plague current systems must be solved. First, writing parallel programs by hand is very difficult. The programmer must manage communication, synchronization, and scheduling of tens to thousands of independent processes. The burden of correctly managing the environment often overwhelms programmers. Second, once implemented on a particular MIMD architecture, the resulting codes are usually not usable on other MIMD architectures, necessitating a substantial effort to port. This discourages users from parallelizing their code, since new architectures are introduced so frequently. Third, there is no software support for transparently executing applications on heterogeneous "meta- systems" comprised of a variety of high-performance architectures. This proposal addresses all three of these problems. We have attacked the first two with Mentat, an easy-to-use, object- oriented, parallel processing system developed at the University of Virginia. We plan to test the efficacy of the Mentat approach on a set of real applications on a variety of platforms. The objective is to determine whether Mentat is easy to use on real applications and to measure performance. Our approach to the third problem is evolutionary. We will extend Mentat into a heterogeneous environment, and use the extended Mentat as a test- bed for meta-systems experimentation. Based on experimental results, a prototype meta-system that provides an easy-to-use, high performance abstraction for users will be constructed.