A software control structure for managing partitions of a data parallel program

This paper concerns the definition and the evaluation of an approach to the handling of objects spanning over several partitions of a parallel data structure, whenever such partitions are assigned to different nodes of a distributed-memory MIMD parallel machine. The proposed control strategy is based on the introduction of different types of hierarchy of manager processes, which handle information exchanges between working processes operating upon the parallel data structure in a distributed way, thus avoiding the need of a single centralized controller. The structure is not tailored to a particular data parallel algorithm: it will be here applied, as an example, to a parallel edge detection algorithm. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc