A Bridging Model for Multi-Core Computing

Writing software for one parallel system is a feasible though arduous task. Reusing the substantial intellectual effort so expended for programming a second system has proved much more challenging. In sequential comput-ing algorithms textbooks and portable software are resources that enable software systems to be written that are efficiently portable across changing hardware platforms. These resources are currently lacking in the area of multi-core architectures, where a programmer seeking high performance has no comparable opportunity to build on the intellectual efforts of others. In order to address this problem we propose a bridging model aimed at capturing the most basic resource parameters of multi-core architectures. We suggest that the considerable intellectual effort needed for designing efficient algorithms for such architectures may be most fruitfully expended in design-ing portable algorithms, once and for all, for such a bridging model. Portable algorithms would contain efficient designs for all reasonable combinations of the basic resource parameters and input sizes, and would form the basis for implementation or compilation for particular machines. Our Multi-BSP model is a multi-level model that has explicit parameters for processor numbers, memory/cache sizes, communication costs, and syn-chronization costs. The lowest level corresponds to shared memory or the PRAM, acknowledging the relevance of that model for whatever limitations on memory and processor numbers it may be efficacious to emulate it. We propose parameter-aware portable algorithms that run efficiently o