Distributed futures for efficient data transfer between parallel processes

International audienceThis paper defines distributed futures, a construct that provides at the same time a data container similar to a distributed vector, and a single synchronization entity that behaves similarly to a standard future. This simple construct makes it easy to program a composition, in a task-parallel way, of several massively data-parallel tasks. The approach is implemented and evaluated in the context of a bulk synchronous parallel (BSP) active object framework