Data Distribution Analysis and Optimization for Pointer-Based Distributed Programs

High Performance Fortran (HPF) provides distributed arrays to efficiently support a global name space on distributed memory architectures. The distributed data structures supported by HPF, however, are only limited to array constructs, and do not extend to pointer-based distributed structures. With the support of distributed pointers and class abstractions in parallel C++-like languages, application programmers now can build their own pointer-based aggregate objects to provide a global name space on distributed environments. However, a critical question remains if the compiler can understand the distribution pattern of pointer-based distributed objects built by application programmers, and perform optimization as effectively as the HPF compiler does with distributed arrays. In this paper, we address this challenging issue. In our work, we first present a parallel programming model which allows application programmers to build pointer-based distributed objects at application levels. Nex..