Mobile pipelines: Parallelizing left-looking algorithms using navigational programming

Abstract

Abstract. We consider the class of “left-looking ” sequential matrix algorithms: consumer-driven algorithms that are characterized by “lazy” propagation of data. Left-looking algorithms are difficult to parallelize using the message-passing or distributed shared memory models because they only possess pipeline parallelism. We show that these algorithms can be directly parallelized using mobile pipelines provided by the Navigational Programming methodology. We present performance data demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.