The Data Mover: A machine-independent abstraction for managing customized data motion

This paper discusses an abstraction, called the Data Mover, for expressing machine-independent customized communication algorithms in a variety of block-structured applications. The Data Mover enables its user to express data motion using intuitive geometric operations that encapsulate the low-level details of the underlying communication. Communication patterns are expressed as collective operations, and are restricted to movement of rectangular array sections. We describe the Data Mover model of communication, and present performance for various applications. The Data Mover currently serves as useful middleware for application library designers, but defines a simple machine-independent interface suitable as a target for a compiler or compiler run time library