Parasol Seminar Fall 2009 | Parasol Laboratory Intranet

Parasol Seminar Fall 2009

Friday October 02, 2009. 4:00 pm
Room 302 HRBB

The STAPL pList

Gabriel Tanase.
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University

Abstract

The Standard Template Adaptive Parallel Library (STAPL) is a parallel programming library that extends C++ with support for parallelism. STAPL provides a collection of distributed data structures (pContainers) and parallel algorithms (pAlgorithms) and a generic methodology for extending them to provide customized functionality. STAPL pContainers are thread-safe, concurrent objects, providing appropriate interfaces (e.g., views) that can be used by generic pAlgorithms. In this work we present the design and implementation the STAPL pList, a parallel container that has the properties of a sequential list, but allows for scalable concurrent access when used in a parallel program. The pList provides STL equivalent methods, such as insert, erase, and splice, additional methods such as split, and efficient asynchronous (non-blocking) variants of some methods for improved parallel performance. We evaluate the performance of the STAPL pList on an IBM Power 5 cluster and on a CRAY XT4 massively parallel processing system. Although lists are generally not considered good data structures for parallel processing, we show that pList methods and pAlgorithms (p_generate and p_partial_sum) operating on pLists provide good scalability on more than 10^3 processors and that pList compares favorably with other dynamic data structures such as the pVector.

This is joint work with Xiabing Xu, Antal Buss, Ioannis Papadopoulos, Olga Pearce, Timmie Smith, Nathan Thomas, Mauro Bianco, Nancy M. Amato and Lawrence Rauchwerger.

Biography

Gabriel Tanase is a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University working with Dr. Lawrence Rauchwerger and Dr. Nancy Amato in the Software & Systems Group of the Parasol Lab. He received his Bachelor of Science from the Polytechnic University of Bucharest, Romania in 1999 and Master of Science from the same University in 2000. His research interests include parallel programming languages and libraries, parallel algorithms and generic programming. More information about Gabriel Tanase can be found at http://parasol.tamu.edu/people/gabrielt.

Department of Computer Science and Engineering | Dwight Look College of Engineering | Texas A&M University
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