Automatic Placement of Communications in Mesh-Partitioning Parallelization

Laurent Hascoet INRIA, BP93, 06902 Sophia-Antipolis, France

Proceedings of the PPoPP'97 Conference, Las Vegas, Nevada, june 1997 (9 pages)

Abstract: We present a tool for mesh-partitioning parallelization of numerical programs working iteratively on an unstructured mesh. This conventional method splits a mesh into sub-meshes, adding some overlap on the boundaries of the sub-meshes. The program is then run in SPMD mode on a parallel architecture with distributed memory. It is necessary to add calls to communication routines at a few carefully selected locations in the code. The tool presented here uses the data-dependence information to mechanize the placement of these synchronizations. Additionally, we see that there is not a unique solution for placing these synchronizations, and performance depends on this choice.

Keywords: parallelization, SPMD, program analysis, program transformation, mesh partition, finite elements, Navier-Stokes

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@inproceedings{Hascoet97,
  author = {Hasco\"et, L.},
  title = {Automatic Placement of Communications in
           Mesh-Partitioning Parallelization},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on
               Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming, PPoPP'97,
               Las Vegas, Nevada, ACM SIGPLAN Notices},
  volume = 32,
  number = 7,
  pages = {136-144},
  year = 1997
}