Evaluation of compiler and runtime library approaches for supporting parallel regular applications
Dhruva R. Chakrabarti, P. Banerjee, Antonio Lain · 2002
Important applications including those in computational chemistry, computational fluid dynamics, structural analysis and sparse matrix applications usually consist of a mixture of regular and irregular accesses. While current state-of-the-art run-time library support for such applications handles the irregular accesses reasonably well, the efficacy of the optimizations at run-time for the regular accesses is yet to be proven. This paper aims to find a better approach to handle the above applications in a unified compiler and run-time framework. Specifically, this paper considers only regular applications and evaluates the performance of two approaches, a run-rime approach using PILAR and a compile-time approach using a commercial HPF compiler. This study shows that using a particular representation of regular accesses, the performance of regular code using run-time libraries can come close to the performance of code generated by a compiler. It also determines the operations that usually contribute largely to the run-time overhead in case of regular accesses. Experimental results are reported for three regular applications on a 16-processor IBM SP-2.