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. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.