This paper presents the simulation and wavefront parallel-programming patterns of the MAP3S pattern-based parallel programming system for distributed-memory environments. Both patterns target iterative computations on static-and-regular meshes. In addition to providing performance-oriented features, such as asynchronous communication and distribution of the computational workload that is tailored to fit the computation, the patterns also provide usability-oriented features, such as direct mesh-access, mesh memory-footprint distribution, and a versatile data-dependency specification scripting-language. Parallel programs developed using MAP3S achieve significant performance gains and capability enhancements on both low-end and high-end interconnect-equipped distributed-memory systems.

Most contemporary processors offer some version of Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) machinery — vector registers and instructions to manipulate data stored in such registers. The central idea of this paper is to use these SIMD resources to improve the performance of the tail of recursive sorting algorithms. When the number of elements to be sorted reaches a set threshold, data is loaded into the vector registers, manipulated in-register, and the result stored back to memory. Three implementations of sorting with two different SIMD machineries — x86-64’s SSE2 and G5’s AltiVec — demonstrate that this idea delivers significant speed improvements. The improvements provided are orthogonal to the gains obtained through empirical search for a suitable sorting algorithm [11]. When integrated with the Dynamically Tuned Sorting Library (DTSL) this new code generation strategy reduces the time spent by DTSL up to 22 % for moderately-sized arrays, with greater relative reductions for small arrays. Wall-clock performance of d-heaps is improved by up to 39 % using a similar technique.

This paper presents a parallel external-memory algorithm for performing a breadth-first traversal of an implicit graph on a cluster of workstations. The algorithm is a parallel version of the sorting-based external-memory frontier breadth-first traversal with delayed duplicate detection algorithm. The algorithm distributes the workload according to intervals that are computed at runtime via a sampling-based process. We present an experimental evaluation of the algorithm where we compare its performance to that of its sequential counterpart on the implicit graphs of two classic planning problems. The speedups attained by the algorithm over its sequential counterpart are consistently near linear and frequently above linear. Analysis reveals that the algorithm is proficient at distributing the workload and that increasing the number of samples obtained by the sampling-based process improves workload distribution. Analysis also reveals that the algorithm benefits from the caching of external memory in internal memory that is done by the operating system