Language and compiler support for hybrid-parallel programming on SMP clusters

Abstract

In this paper we present HPF extensions for clusters of SMPs and their implementation within the VFC compiler. The main goal of these extensions is to optimize HPF for clusters of SMPs by enhancing the functionality of the mapping mechanisms and by providing the user with high-level means for controlling key aspects of distributed-memory and shared-memory parallelization. Based on the proposed language extensions, the VFC compiler adopts a hybrid parallelization strategy which closely reflects the hierarchical structure of SMP clusters by exploiting shared-memory parallelism based on OpenMP within nodes and distributed-memory parallelism utilizing MPI across nodes. We describe the language extensions, outline the hybrid parallelization strategy of VFC and present experimental results which show the effectiveness of these techniques. © 2002 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.