Toward supporting data parallel programming on clusters of symmetric multiprocessors

Abstract

The paper reports the design of a runtime library for data-parallel programming on clusters of symmetric multiprocessors (SMP clusters). Our design algorithms exploit a hybrid methodology which maps directly to the underlying hierarchical memory system in SMP clusters, by combining two styles of programming methodologies-threads (shared memory programming) within a SMP node and message passing between SMP nodes. This hybrid approach has been used in the implementation of a library for collective communications. The prototype library is implemented based on standard interfaces for threads (pthread) and message passing (MPI). Experimental results on a cluster of Sun UltraSparc-II workstations are reported.