Supporting SPMD execution for dynamic data structures

Abstract

In this paper, we address the problem of supporting SPMD execution of programs that use recursively-defined dynamic data structures on distributed memory machines. The techniques developed for supporting SPMD execution of array-based programs rely on the fact that arrays are statically defined and directly addressable. As a result, these techniques do not apply to recursive data structures, which are neither statically defined nor directly addressable. We propose a three pronged approach. First, we describe a simple mechanism for migrating a thread of control based on the layout of heap allocated data. Second, we explain how to introduce parallelism into the model using a technique based on futures and lazy task creation[21]. Third, we present the compiler analyses and parallelization techniques that are required to exploit the proposed mechanism.