Implementation of a Portable Nested Data-Parallel Language

This paper gives an overview of the implementation of NESL, a portable nested data-parallel language. This language and its implementation are the first to fully support nested data structures as well as nested data- parallel function calls. These features allow the concise description of parallel a...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Blelloch, Guy E, Chatterjee, Siddhartha, Hardwick, Jonathan C, Sipelstein, Jay, Zagha, Marco
Format: Report
Language:English
Subjects:
ADDITION
ALGORITHMS
COMPUTER PROGRAMMING
Computer Programming and Software
FUNCTIONS
GRAPHS
INSTALLATION
LANGUAGE
LIBRARIES
MACHINES
PARALLEL PROCESSING
PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
SPARSE MATRIX
STRUCTURES
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Summary:This paper gives an overview of the implementation of NESL, a portable nested data-parallel language. This language and its implementation are the first to fully support nested data structures as well as nested data- parallel function calls. These features allow the concise description of parallel algorithms on irregular data structures, such as sparse matrices and graphs. In addition, they maintain the advantages of data-parallel languages: a simple programming model and portability. The current NESL implementation is based on an intermediate language called VcoDE and a library of vector routines called CVL. It runs on the Connection Machines CM-2 and CM-5, the Cray C90, and serial workstations. We compare initial benchmark results of NESL with those of machine-specific code on these machines for three algorithms: least-squares line-fitting, median finding, and a sparse-matrix vector product. These results show that NESL's performance is competitive with that of machine-specific code for regular dense data, and is often superior for irregular data.