Portable parallel programming in a Fortran environment

Experience using the Argonne-developed PARMACs macro package to implement a portable parallel programming environment is described. Fortran programs with intrinsic parallelism of coarse and medium granularity are easily converted to parallel programs which are portable among a number of commercially...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Computer physics communications 1989-12, Vol.57 (1), p.278-284
Main Author: May, Edward N.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Computational techniques
Exact sciences and technology
Mathematical methods in physics
Physics
Citations: Items that this one cites
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Experience using the Argonne-developed PARMACs macro package to implement a portable parallel programming environment is described. Fortran programs with intrinsic parallelism of coarse and medium granularity are easily converted to parallel programs which are portable among a number of commercially available parallel processors in the class of shared-memory bus-based and local-memory network based MIMD processors. The parallelism is implemented using standard UNIX tools and a small number of easily understood synchronization concepts (monitors and message-passing techniques) to construct and coordinate multiple cooperating processes on one or many processors. Bencmark results are presented for parallel computers such as the Alliant FX/8, the Encore MultiMax, the Sequent Balance, the Intel iPSC/2 Hypercube and a network of Sun 3 workstations. These parallel machines are typical MIMD types with 8–30 processors, such rated at 1–10 Mips processing power. The demonstration code used for this work is a Monte Carlo simulation of the response to photons of a “nearly realistic” lead, iron and plastic electromagnetic and hadronic calorimeter, using the EGS4 code system.
ISSN:0010-4655
1879-2944
DOI:10.1016/0010-4655(89)90228-2