Efficient Runtime Support for a Partitioned Global Logical Address Space
D. Brian Larkins, John Snyder, James Dinan · 2018
Many HPC applications have successfully applied Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) parallel programming models to efficiently manage shared data that is distributed across multiple nodes in a distributed memory system. However, while the flat addressing model provided by PGAS systems is effective for regular array data, it renders such systems difficult to use with loosely-structured or sparse data. This work proposes a logically addressed PGLAS model that naturally supports a variety of data models through the automatic mapping of an application-defined key space onto the underlying distributed memory system. We present an efficient implementation of the PGLAS model built atop a parallel distributed hash table (PDHT) and demonstrate that this model is amenable to offloading using the Portals 4 network programming interface. We demonstrate the effectiveness of PDHT using representative applications from the computational chemistry and genomics domains. Results indicate that PGLAS models such as PDHT provide a promising new method for parallelizing applications with non-regular data.