Efficient translation of OpenMP to distributed memory

Abstract

The shared memory paradigm provides many benefits to the parallel programmer, particular with respect to applications that are hard to parallelize. Unfortunately, there are currently no efficient implementations of OpenMP for distributed memory platforms and this greatly diminishes its usefulness for real world parallel application development. In this paper we introduce a basic strategy for implementing OpenMP on distributed memory systems via a translation to Global Arrays. Global Arrays is a library of routines that provides many of the same features as OpenMP yet targets distributed memory platforms. Since it enables a reasonable translation strategy and also allows precise control over the movement of data within the resulting code, we believe it has the potential to provide higher levels of performance than the traditional translation of OpenMP to distributed memory via software distributed shared memory. © Springer-Verlag 2004.