COLTHPF,a run-time support for the high-level co-ordination of HPF tasks

This paper describes COLT_HPF, a run-time support specifically designed for the co-ordination of concurrent and communicating HPF tasks. COLT_HPF is implemented on top of MPI and requires only small changes to the run-time support of the HPF compiler used. Although the COLT_HPF API can be used directly by programmers to write applications as a flat collection of interacting data-parallel tasks, we believe that it can be used more productively through a compiler of a simple high-level co-ordination language which facilitates programmers in structuring a set of data-parallel HPF tasks according to common forms of task-parallelism. The paper outlines design and implementation issues, and discusses the main differences from other approaches to exploiting task parallelism in the HPF framework. We show how COLT_HPF can be used to implement common forms of parallelism, e.g. pipeline and processor farms, and we present experimental results regarding both synthetic micro-benchmarks and sample applications. The experiments were conducted on an SGI/Cray T3E using Adaptor, a public domain HPF compiler. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.