Run-time scheduling and execution of loops on message passing machines

Abstract

Sparse system solvers and general purpose codes for solving partial differential equations are examples of the many types of problems whose irregularity can result in poor performance on distributed memory machines. Often, the data structures used in these problems are very flexible. Crucial details concerning loop dependences are encoded in these structures rather than being explicitly represented in the program. Good methods for parallelizing and partitioning these types of problems require assignment of computations in rather arbitrary ways. Naive implementations of programs on distributed memory machines requiring general loop partitions can be extremely inefficient. Instead, the scheduling mechanism needs to capture the data reference patterns of the loops in order to partition the problem. First, the indices assigned to each processor must be locally numbered. Next, it is necessary to precompute what information is needed by each processor at various points in the computation. The precomputed information is then used to generate an execution template designed to carry out the computation, communication, and partitioning of data, in an optimized manner. The design is presented for a general preprocessor and schedule executer, the structures of which do not vary, even though the details of the computation and of the type of information are problem dependent