A Cluster-as-Accelerator Approach for SPMD-Free Data Parallelism

Abstract

In this paper we present a novel approach for functional-style programming of distributed-memory clusters, targeting data-centric applications. The programming model proposed is purely sequential, SPMD-free and based on high-level functional features introduced since C++11 specification. Additionally, we propose a novel cluster-as-accelerator design principle. In this scheme, cluster nodes act as general interpreters of user-defined functional tasks over node-local portions of distributed data structures. We envision coupling a simple yet powerful programming model with a lightweight, locality-aware distributed runtime as a promising step along the road towards high-performance data analytics, in particular under the perspective of the upcoming exascale era. We implemented the proposed approach in SkeDaTo, a prototyping C++ library of data-parallel skeletons exploiting cluster-as-accelerator at the bottom layer of the runtime software stack.