OS Support for Portable Bulk Synchronous Parallel Programs
Abdelsalam Heddaya, Amr Fahmy · 1994
For parallel programs to become portable, they must be executable with uniform efficiency on a varietyofhardware platforms, which is not the case at present. In 1990, Valiant proposed Bulk-Synchronous Parallelism (BSP) as a model on which portable parallel programs can be built [Val90a]. We argue that shared-memory BSP is efficiently implementable on a wide variety of parallel hardware, and that BSP forms a useful basis for providing an even higher level programming interface based on Sequential Consistency (SC). A list of OS memory and thread management features needed to support BSP and SC parallel programs are given, under the assumption that the parallel computer is space-shared among multiple parallel task, rather than time-shared. Known techniques to realize efficiently the most important of these features are sketched.