Support and optimization for parallel sparse programs with array intrinsics of Fortran 90 q

Parallel Computing 30 (2004) 527–550 Fortran 90 provides a rich set of array intrinsic functions that are useful for representing array expressions and data parallel programming. However, the application of these intrinsic functions to sparse data sets in distributed memory environments, is currently not supported by vendors of Fortran 90 and HPF compilers. Our recent research work has been aimed at, providing parallel processing supports for sparse array intrinsics of Fortran 90. Our supporting library uses the following two-level design: (1) in our low-level routines, a sparse input matrix needs to be specified with compression/distribution schemes by programmers, and (2) in the high-level representation, sparse array functions are overloaded for array intrinsic interfaces so that programmers need not be concerned about low-level details. This raises a very interesting optimization problem in the strategies used to transform high-level representations to low-level routines by the automatic selection of distribution and compression schemes for sparse data sets. In this paper, we propose solutions to address this optimization problem, which is shown to be NP-hard. We develop a heuristic algorithm based on annotated progra