Speaker: Dr Bryan Carpenter, University of Southampton.
Date/Time: 11th June 2008, 13:00-14:00.
Location: Room G74, Philip Lyle Building.
Map: http://www.info.rdg.ac.uk/maps/maps-display.asp
Abstract:
Gadget 2 is a massively parallel production code for cosmological simulations, widely used in astrophysics research. It is a C code parallelized using MPI.
Some years ago the HPspmd programming model was proposed as a higher level approach to data-parallel programming. It is characterized by its emphasis on parallel array data structures and explicit collective communication. Although it was originally intended for pure distributed memory computers, I will argue that this approach maps well to modern architectures consisting of clusters of multicore processors.
Up till now, typical HPspmd codes have dealt with relatively simple, regular problems. In this talk I will analyse the Gadget 2 code from the viewpoint of the HPspmd model, investigating the extent to which the higher level features of this model can be exploited in a complex and highly irregular code, and what extra communication functions (or language extensions) might be desirable for such applications.
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