A hybrid execution model for fine-grained languages on distributed memory multicomputers

While ne-grained concurrent languages can naturally capture concurrency in many irregular and dynamic problems, their exibility has generally resulted in poor execution e ciency. In such languages the computation consists of many small threads which are created dynamically and synchronized implicitly. In order to minimize the overhead of these operations, we propose ahybrid execution model which dynamically adapts to runtime data layout, providing both sequential e ciency and low overhead parallel execution. This model uses separately optimized sequential and parallel versions of code. Sequential e ciency is obtained by dynamically coalescing threads via stack-based execution and parallel e ciency through latency hiding and cheap synchronization using heap-allocated activation frames. Novel aspects of the stack mechanism include handling return values for futures and executing forwarded messages (the responsibility to reply is passed along, like call/cc in Scheme) on the stack. In addition, the hybrid execution model is expressed entirely in C, and therefore is easily portable to many systems. Experiments with function-call intensive programs show that this model achieves sequential e ciency comparable to C programs. Experiments with regular and irregular application kernels on the CM-

Compiling for parallel multithreaded computation on symmetric multiprocessors

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1998.Includes bibliographical references (p. 145-149).by Andrew Shaw.Ph.D