12,369 research outputs found
Object-oriented implementations of the MPDATA advection equation solver in C++, Python and Fortran
Three object-oriented implementations of a prototype solver of the advection
equation are introduced. The presented programs are based on Blitz++ (C++),
NumPy (Python), and Fortran's built-in array containers. The solvers include an
implementation of the Multidimensional Positive-Definite Advective Transport
Algorithm (MPDATA). The introduced codes exemplify how the application of
object-oriented programming (OOP) techniques allows to reproduce the
mathematical notation used in the literature within the program code. A
discussion on the tradeoffs of the programming language choice is presented.
The main angles of comparison are code brevity and syntax clarity (and hence
maintainability and auditability) as well as performance. In the case of
Python, a significant performance gain is observed when switching from the
standard interpreter (CPython) to the PyPy implementation of Python. Entire
source code of all three implementations is embedded in the text and is
licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL license
Managing Communication Latency-Hiding at Runtime for Parallel Programming Languages and Libraries
This work introduces a runtime model for managing communication with support
for latency-hiding. The model enables non-computer science researchers to
exploit communication latency-hiding techniques seamlessly. For compiled
languages, it is often possible to create efficient schedules for
communication, but this is not the case for interpreted languages. By
maintaining data dependencies between scheduled operations, it is possible to
aggressively initiate communication and lazily evaluate tasks to allow maximal
time for the communication to finish before entering a wait state. We implement
a heuristic of this model in DistNumPy, an auto-parallelizing version of
numerical Python that allows sequential NumPy programs to run on distributed
memory architectures. Furthermore, we present performance comparisons for eight
benchmarks with and without automatic latency-hiding. The results shows that
our model reduces the time spent on waiting for communication as much as 27
times, from a maximum of 54% to only 2% of the total execution time, in a
stencil application.Comment: PREPRIN
Learning from the Success of MPI
The Message Passing Interface (MPI) has been extremely successful as a
portable way to program high-performance parallel computers. This success has
occurred in spite of the view of many that message passing is difficult and
that other approaches, including automatic parallelization and directive-based
parallelism, are easier to use. This paper argues that MPI has succeeded
because it addresses all of the important issues in providing a parallel
programming model.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figur
Vienna FORTRAN: A FORTRAN language extension for distributed memory multiprocessors
Exploiting the performance potential of distributed memory machines requires a careful distribution of data across the processors. Vienna FORTRAN is a language extension of FORTRAN which provides the user with a wide range of facilities for such mapping of data structures. However, programs in Vienna FORTRAN are written using global data references. Thus, the user has the advantage of a shared memory programming paradigm while explicitly controlling the placement of data. The basic features of Vienna FORTRAN are presented along with a set of examples illustrating the use of these features
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