6 research outputs found
Application of Pfortran and Co-Array Fortran in the parallelization of the GROMOS96 molecular dynamics module
After at least a decade of parallel tool development, parallelization of scientific applications remains a significant undertaking. Typically parallelization is a specialized activity supported only partially by the programming tool set, with the programmer involved with parallel issues in addition to sequential ones. The details of concern range from algorithm design down to low-level data movement details. The aim of parallel programming tools is to automate the latter without sacrificing performance and portability, allowing the programmer to focus on algorithm specification and development. We present our use of two similar parallelization tools, Pfortran and Cray's Co-Array Fortran, in the parallelization of the GROMOS96 molecular dynamics module. Our parallelization started from the GROMOS96 distribution's sharedmemory implementation of the replicated algorithm, but used little of that existing parallel structure. Consequently, our parallelization was close to starting with the sequential version. We found the intuitive extensions to Pfortran and Co-Array Fortran helpful in the rapid parallelization of the project. We present performance figures for both the Pfortran and CoArray Fortran parallelizations showing linear speedup within the range expected by these parallelization methods
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Advanced parallel programming models research and development opportunities.
There is currently a large research and development effort within the high-performance computing community on advanced parallel programming models. This research can potentially have an impact on parallel applications, system software, and computing architectures in the next several years. Given Sandia's expertise and unique perspective in these areas, particularly on very large-scale systems, there are many areas in which Sandia can contribute to this effort. This technical report provides a survey of past and present parallel programming model research projects and provides a detailed description of the Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming model. The PGAS model may offer several improvements over the traditional distributed memory message passing model, which is the dominant model currently being used at Sandia. This technical report discusses these potential benefits and outlines specific areas where Sandia's expertise could contribute to current research activities. In particular, we describe several projects in the areas of high-performance networking, operating systems and parallel runtime systems, compilers, application development, and performance evaluation