{"title":"Linguistic constructs for BSP style programming","authors":"T. Cheatham","doi":"10.1109/ICPPW.1996.538595","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPPW.1996.538595","url":null,"abstract":"A necessary condition for the establishment, on a substantial basis, of a parallel software industry would appear to be the availability of technology for generating transportable software, i.e. architecture independent software which delivers scalable performance for a wide variety of applications on a wide range of multiprocessor computers. We are developing H-BSP-a general purpose parallel computing environment for developing transportable programs. H-BSP is based on the Bulk Synchronous Parallel Model (BSP), in which a computation involves a number of supersteps, each having several parallel computational threads that synchronize at the end of the superstep. The BSP Model deals explicitly with the notion of communication among computational threads and introduces parameters g and L that quantify the ratio of computation throughput to communication throughput and the synchronization period, respectively. These two parameters, together with the number of processors and the problem size, are used to quantify the performance and, therefore, the transportability of given classes of algorithms across machines having different values for these parameters. Recently algorithm designers have developed algorithms for a number of regular problems that are provably optimal as functions of g and L, but for many irregular problems developing optimal solutions will depend on the compiler and the run-time system taking advantage of the g and L values for the intended target. This paper describes the BSP Model and some preliminary linguistic constructs for BSP style programming.","PeriodicalId":123047,"journal":{"name":"1996 Proceedings ICPP Workshop on Challenges for Parallel Processing","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1996-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124649520","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What good are shared-memory models?","authors":"Phillip B. Gibbons","doi":"10.1109/ICPPW.1996.538596","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPPW.1996.538596","url":null,"abstract":"Shared memory models have been criticized for years for failing to model essential realities of parallel machines. Given the current wave of popular message-passing and distributed memory models (e.g., BSP, LOGP), it is natural to ask whether shared memory models have outlived any usefulness they may have had. In this paper we discuss the continuing importance of shared memory models in the design and analysis of parallel algorithms. We describe a new model, the Queuing Shared Memory (QSM) model, that accounts for limited communication bandwidth while still providing a shared memory abstraction, and provide evidence of its practicality. Finally, we discuss important areas for future models research. We argue that the compelling need for parallel computing in large scale data analysis (e.g., decision support, data mining) implies that the most important modeling issue going forward concerns how best to model disk I/O.","PeriodicalId":123047,"journal":{"name":"1996 Proceedings ICPP Workshop on Challenges for Parallel Processing","volume":"509 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1996-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122758419","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}