Data Distribution Specication for High Performance Computing

Abstract: High performance computing (HPC) architectures are specialized machines which can reach their peak performance only if they are programmed in a way which exploits the idiosyncrasies of the architecture. An important feature of most such archi-tectures is a physically distributed memory, resulting in the requirement to take data locality into account independent of the memory model oered to the user. In this pa-per we discuss various ways for managing data distribution in a program, comparing in particular the low-level message-passing approach to that in High Performance Fortran (HPF) and other high performance languages. The main part of the paper outlines a method for the specication of data distribution semantics for distributed-memory ar-chitectures and clusters of SMPs. The paper concludes with a discussion of open issues and references to future work