The aggregate function API: It’s not just for PAPERS anymore

H. G. Dietz, T. I. Mattox, G. Krishnamurthy

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

The concept of “data parallelism” is a pervasive force throughout parallel processing. Although a certain level of processing-element autonomy can help performance, the fact is that many parallel algorithms, applications, and compiler analysis techniques focus on identifying a set of data objects that can be processed using loosely synchronous parallelism. Thus, it is not surprising that a large number of communication libraries support at least a few synchronized aggregate operations on data. Over the past few years, we have developed eleven different types of PAPERS (Purdue’s Adapter for Parallel Execution and Rapid Synchronization) hardware specifically to efficiently implement aggregate functions for clusters of PCs or workstations. The Aggregate Function Application Program Interface (AFAPI) library was initially designed to be a portable high-level interface to the various types of PAPERS cluster hardware, so one would expect it to work well using this custom hardware, and it does work well. In this paper, we show that the AFAPI is also an efficient programming model for other types of parallel systems — especially shared memory multiprocessors. For many operations, AFAPI can outperform threads libraries and other more traditional shared memory programming models.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationLanguages and Compilers for Parallel Computing - 10th International Workshop, LCPC 1997, Proceedings
EditorsPen-Chung Yew, Chua-Huang Huang, P. Sadayappan, Zhiyuan Li, Siddharta Chatterjee, David Sehr
Pages277-291
Number of pages15
DOIs
StatePublished - 1998
Event10th Annual International Workshop on Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing, LCPC 1997 - Minneapolis, United States
Duration: Aug 7 1997Aug 9 1997

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume1366
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference10th Annual International Workshop on Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing, LCPC 1997
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityMinneapolis
Period8/7/978/9/97

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Computer Science (all)

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