Towards efficiency and portability: Programming with the BSP model

The Bulk-Synchronous Parallel (BSP) model was proposed by Valiant as a model for general-purpose parallel computation. The objective of the model is to allow the design of parallel programs that can be executed efficiently on a variety of architectures. While many theoretical arguments in support of the BSP model have been presented, the degree to which the model can be efficiently utilized on existing parallel machines remains unclear. To explore this question, we implemented s small library of BSP functions, called the Green BSP library, on several parallel platforms. We also created a number of parallel applications based on this library. Here, we report on the performance of six of these applications on three different parallel platforms. Our preliminary results suggest that the BSP model can be used to develop efficient and portable programs for a range of machines and applications