OS Support for Portable Bulk Synchronous Parallel Programs

Abstract

For parallel programs to become portable, they must be executable with uniform efficiency oil a variety of hardware platforms which is not the case at present. In 1990, Valiant proposed Bulk-Synchronous Parallelism ( BSP ) as a model on which portable parallel programs can be built [Val90a]. We argue that shared-memory BSP is efficiently implementable on a wide variety of parallel hardware and that BSP forms a useful basis for providing an even higher level programming interface based on Sequential Consistency (SC). A list of OS memory and thread management features needed to support BSP and SC parallel programs are given, under the assumption that the parallel computer is space-shared among multiple parallel task rather than time-shared. Known techniques to realize efficiently the most important of these features are sketched.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 05, 1994
Accession Number
ADA451231

Entities

People

  • Abdelsalam Heddaya
  • Amr F. Fahmy

Organizations

  • Boston University

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • C Programming Language
  • Computations
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Computing System Architectures
  • Consistency
  • Hot Spots
  • Language
  • Operating Systems
  • Parallel Computing
  • Platforms
  • Programming Languages
  • Standards
  • Universities

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Parallel and Distributed Computing.

Technology Areas

  • Space