Parallel Phase Model: A Programming Model for High-end Parallel Machines with Manycores

Abstract

This paper presents a parallel programming model, Parallel Phase Model (PPM), for next-generation high-end parallel machines based on a distributed memory architecture consisting of a networked cluster of nodes with a large number of cores on each node. PPM has a unified high-level programming abstraction that facilitates the design and implementation of parallel algorithms to exploit both the parallelism of the many cores and the parallelism at the cluster level. The programming abstraction will be suitable for expressing both fine-grained and coarse-grained parallelism. It includes a few high-level parallel programming language constructs that can be added as an extension to an existing (sequential or parallel) programming language such as C; and the implementation of PPM also includes a light-weight runtime library that runs on top of an existing network communication software layer (e.g. MPI). Design philosophy of PPM and details of the programming abstraction are also presented. Several unstructured applications that inherently require high-volume random fine-grained data accesses have been implemented in PPM with very promising results.

Performance enhancing factors for manycore architectures: State-of-the-art

“…The performance of MPI calls is limited for the overlapping of dynamic applications as highlighted in [11]. A parallel phase model approach is introduced to improve the performance of irregular memory access application by providing effective overlap of communication and computation [12].…”