A Software Environment for High-Performance Parallel Computing

高性能并行计算的软件环境

• 批准号: 9201822
• 负责人: Andrew Grimshaw
• 金额: $ 45.31万
• 依托单位: University of Virginia Main Campus
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 1992
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1992-08-01 至 1996-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9201822&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Software; Environment; Performance; Parallel; Computing

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.

在高性能 MIMD 架构在生产科学、工程和商业应用中变得普遍之前，必须解决困扰当前系统的三个编程问题。 首先，手工编写并行程序非常困难。 程序员必须管理数十到数千个独立进程的通信、同步和调度。 正确管理环境的负担常常压垮程序员。 其次，一旦在特定的 MIMD 架构上实现，生成的代码通常无法在其他 MIMD 架构上使用，需要付出大量的努力来移植。 这会阻碍用户并行化他们的代码，因为新架构的引入如此频繁。 第三，没有软件支持在由各种高性能架构组成的异构“元系统”上透明地执行应用程序。 该提案解决了所有这三个问题。 我们用 Mentat 解决了前两个问题，Mentat 是弗吉尼亚大学开发的一种易于使用、面向对象的并行处理系统。 我们计划在各种平台上的一组实际应用程序上测试 Mentat 方法的功效。 目的是确定 Mentat 是否易于在实际应用中使用并衡量性能。 我们解决第三个问题的方法是渐进的。 我们将把 Mentat 扩展到异构环境中，并使用扩展的 Mentat 作为元系统实验的测试平台。 基于实验结果，将构建一个原型元系统，为用户提供易于使用、高性能的抽象。