A Novel Approach Towards Automatic Data Distribution

Abstract

Data distribution is one of the key aspects that a parallelizing compiler for a distributed memory architecture should consider, in order to get efficiency from the system. The cost of accessing local and remote data can be one or several orders of magnitude different, and this can dramatically affect performance. In this paper, we present a novel approach to automatically perform static data distribution. All the constraints related to parallelism and data movement are contained in a single data structure, the Communication-Parallelism Graph (CPG). The problem is solved using a linear 0-1 integer programming model and solver. In this paper we present the solution for one-dimensional array distributions, although its extension to multi-dimensional array distributions is also outlined. The solution is static in the sense that the layout of the arrays does not change during the execution of the program. We also show the feasibility of using this approach to solve the problem in terms of compilation time and quality of the solutions generated.