Supporting Dynamic Parallel Object Arrays
Authors:
Orion Lawlor and L. V. Kale
Parallel Programming Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Journal: Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, John Wiley & Sons, 2003; 15:371-393
We present efficient support for generalized arrays of parallel data driven objects. Array elements are regular C++ objects, and are scattered across the parallel machine. An individual element is addressed by its index , which can be an arbitrary object rather than a simple integer. For example, an array index can be a series of numbers, supporting multidimensional sparse arrays; a bit vector, supporting collections of quadtree nodes; or a string. Methods can be invoked on any individual array element from any processor, and the elements can participate in reductions and broadcasts. Individual elements can be created or deleted dynamically at any time. Most importantly, the elements can migrate from processor to processor at any time. The paper discusses support for message delivery and collective operations in face of such dynamic behavior. The migration capabilities of array elements have proven extremely useful, for example, in implementing flexible load balancing strategies and for exploiting workstation clusters adaptively. We present the design, an implementation, and performance results.