A Tool for Interactive Parallelization

Abstract

"Tell me, I'll forget, Show me, I may remember, Involve me, I'll understand." - Confucius This proverb describes the essence of our paper and the motivation behind the development of the Interactive Parallelization Tool (IPT) that can transform serial applications into multiple parallel variants. The end-users of IPT must have an understanding of the basic concepts involved in parallel programming (e.g., data distribution and data gathering). After developing an understanding of the basic parallel programming concepts, IPT can be used by its target audience (domain-experts and students) to semi-automatically generate parallel programs using multiple parallel programming paradigms (MPI, OpenMP, and CUDA), and learn about these paradigms through observation and comparison. This IPT-based personalized learning approach complements the traditional methods of learning and training that usually emphasize the syntax and semantics of one or more programming standards. The main benefit of IPT is that it provides a jumpstart to the domain-experts in using modern HPC platforms for their research and development needs, and hence lowers the adoption barriers to HPC.