Symmetric Data Objects and Remote Memory Access Communication for Fortran 95 Applications

Abstract

Symmetric data objects have been introduced by Cray Inc. in context of SHMEM remote memory access communication on Cray T3D/E systems and later adopted by SGI for their Origin servers. Symmetric data objects greatly simplify parallel programming by allowing programmers to reference remote instance of a data structure by specifying address of the local counterpart. The current paper describes how symmetric data objects and remote memory access communication could be implemented in Fortran 95 without requiring specialized hardware or compiler support. NAS Multi-Grid parallel benchmark was used as an application example and demonstrated competitive performance to the standard MPI implementation