iC2mpi: A Platform for Parallel Execution of Graph-Structured Iterative Computations

Parallelization of sequential programs is often daunting because of the substantial development cost involved. Various solutions have been proposed to address this concern, including directive-based approaches and parallelization platforms. These solutions have not always been successful, in part because many try to address all types of applications. We propose a platform for parallelization of a class of applications that have similar computational structure, namely graph-structured iterative applications. iC2mpi is a unique proof-of-concept prototype platform that provides relatively easy parallelization of existing sequential programs and facilitates experimentation with static partitioning and dynamic load balancing schemes. We demonstrate with various generic application graph topologies and an existing application, namely a time-stepped battlefield management simulation, that our platform can produce good performance with very little effort