Title: Exploiting Parallel Architecture Specifications

Proposer:

Greg Michaelson
Phone: 0131 451 3432
E-mail: greg@macs.hw.ac.uk
www:http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~greg

Suggested supervisors:

Principal goal of the project:

Description:

Parallel architectures are increasingly heterogeneous and hierarchical. That is they contain a range of processor types: cores, CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs etc.; moreover these processors communicate over an hierarchy of communications networks, e.g. cores in a cluster of multi-cores communicate by shared memory or by some switch/LAN.

Rather than expect the programmer to manage the intricacies of these architectures, and revise the program for each new architecture, we would like to automatically adapt the program to the specific target architecture. There are already algorithmic skeletons under development that are suitable for different classes of parallel architecture.

The aim of the project is to identify a suitable parallel architecture description language (PADL), and investigate using it to automatically chose, and to parameterise, algorithmic skeletons for the target application.

The objectives of the project are as follows.

• To research high level parallel programming techniques, including algorithmic skeletons.
• To research PADLs and identify one at an appropriate level of abstraction.
• To investigate using the PADL to automatically chose, and to parameterise, algorithmic skeletons for the target application.
• To evaluate the results on alternate target architectures, most probably the multicore, and Beowulf, architectures in the department.

Resources required:

Linux,
Beowulf Cluster
Multicore

Degree of difficulty:

Challenging

Background needed:

References:

[1] Algorithmic Skeletons