Aurora: scoped behaviour for per-context optimized distributed data sharing

Abstract

We introduce the all-software, standard C++-based Aurora distributed shared data system. As with related systems, it provides a shared data abstraction on distributed memory hardware. An innovation in Aurora is the use of scoped behaviour for per-context data sharing optimizations (i.e., portion of source code, such as a loop or phase). With scoped behaviour a new language scope (e.g., nested braces) can be used to optimize the data sharing behaviour of the selected source code. Different scopes and different shared data can be optimized in different ways. Thus, scoped behaviour provides a novel level of flexibility to incrementally tune the parallel performance of an application.