Bohrium: A Virtual Machine Approach to Portable Parallelism

Abstract

In this paper we introduce, Bohrium, a runtime-system for mapping vector operations onto a number of different hardware platforms, from simple multi-core systems to clusters and GPU enabled systems. In order to make efficient choices Bohrium is implemented as a virtual machine that makes runtime decisions, rather than a statically compiled library, which is the more common approach. In principle, Bohrium can be used for any programming language but for now, the supported languages are limited to Python, C++ and the. Net framework, e.g. C# and F#. The primary success criteria are to maintain a complete abstraction from low-level details and to provide efficient code execution across different, current and future, processors. We evaluate the presented design through a setup that targets a multi-core CPU, an eight-node Cluster, and a GPU, all preliminary prototypes. The evaluation includes three well-known benchmark applications, Black Sholes, Shallow Water, and N-body, implemented in C++, Python, and C# respectively.