EAGER: A Demonstration of the IMP Programming Model

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

The machine architectures used for scientific computing are ever growing in scale and complexity. Software has not been keeping up with this development, and application codes often use multiple parallelism modes and parallel programming systems (typically MPI and a co-processor or threading library) to extract all possible performance. This makes current architectures unnecessarily hard to use for any but the most experienced programmers. This project addresses parallel programming on contemporary supercomputer architectures. Based on a new theoretical model, called the Integrative Model for Parallelism (IMP), this project develops a framework for such hybrid designs. Ultimately, the goal is to develop a production software system that allows domain scientists to write applications independently of the underlying supercomputer hardware. This project creates a demonstration prototype, a `mini-application' for N-body dynamics, a simplified code containing the essential structure of the parallelism in an N-body application, to be used for the demonstration of the principles of the IMP model. This mini-app can be run, unchanged, using different types of parallelism, tailored for the underlying hardware. Having such a software system implies for application scientists both increased productivity over current approaches, and a guarantee of comparable efficiency of execution.