Promise Plus: Flexible Synchronization for Parallel Computations on Arrays

Abstract

Parallel applications make use of parallelism where work is shared between tasks; often, tasks need to exchange data stored in arrays and synchronize depending on the availability of these data. Fine-grained synchronizations, e.g. one synchronization for each element in the array, may lead to too many synchronizations while coarse-grained synchronizations, e.g. a single synchronization for the whole array, may prevent parallelism. We propose PromisePlus, a synchronization tool allowing tasks to synchronize on chunks of arrays with a granularity configurable by the programmer.