Lazy task creation: a technique for increasing the granularity of parallel programs

When a parallel algorithm is written naturally, the resulting program often produces tasks of a finer grain than an implementation can exploit efficiently. Two solutions to the granularity problem that combine parallel tasks dynamically at runtime are discussed. The simpler load-based inlining metho...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on parallel and distributed systems Vol. 2; no. 3; pp. 264 - 280
Main Authors: Mohr, E., Kranz, D.A., Halstead, R.H.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: United States IEEE 01.07.1991
Subjects:
990200 - Mathematics & Computers
ALGORITHMS
ARRAY PROCESSORS
COMPUTER CALCULATIONS
Computer science
Concurrent computing
Costs
GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS//MATHEMATICS, COMPUTING, AND INFORMATION SCIENCE
LISP
MATHEMATICAL LOGIC
Parallel algorithms
PARALLEL PROCESSING
Partitioning algorithms
Program processors
PROGRAMMING
PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
Programming profession
Robustness
Statistics
ISSN:1045-9219, 1558-2183
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:When a parallel algorithm is written naturally, the resulting program often produces tasks of a finer grain than an implementation can exploit efficiently. Two solutions to the granularity problem that combine parallel tasks dynamically at runtime are discussed. The simpler load-based inlining method, in which tasks are combined based on dynamic bad level, is rejected in favor of the safer and more robust lazy task creation method, in which tasks are created only retroactively as processing results become available. The strategies grew out of work on Mul-T, an efficient parallel implementation of Scheme, but could be used with other languages as well. Mul-T implementations of lazy task creation are described for two contrasting machines, and performance statistics that show the method's effectiveness are presented. Lazy task creation is shown to allow efficient execution of naturally expressed algorithms of a substantially finer grain than possible with previous parallel Lisp systems.< >
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-2
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-1
content type line 23
ISSN:1045-9219
1558-2183
DOI:10.1109/71.86103