Open Access
130- https://doi.org/10.1145/209936.209945
Efficient support for irregular applications on distributed-memory machines
- Aug 1, 1995
- Shubhendu S Mukherjee +5 more
Irregular computation problems underlie many important scientific applications. Although these problems are computationally expensive, and so would seem appropriate for parallel machines, their irregular and unpredictable run-time behavior makes this type of parallel program difficult to write and adversely affects run-time performance.This paper explores three issues—partitioning, mutual exclusion, and data transfer—crucial to the efficient execution of irregular problems on distributed-memory machines. Unlike previous work, we studied the same programs running in three alternative systems on the same hardware base (a Thinking Machines CM-5): the CHAOS irregular application library, Transparent Shared Memory (TSM), and eXtensible Shared Memory (XSM). CHAOS and XSM performed equivalently for all three applications. Both systems were somewhat (13%) to significantly faster (991%) than TSM.
- # Distributed-memory Machines
- # Thinking Machines
- # Machines CM-5
- # Irregular Application
- # Shared Memory
- # Alternative Systems
- # Mutual Exclusion
- # Transparent Memory
- # Irregular Behavior
- # Unpredictable Behavior
