Compilers and Programming Interface for High-End Computing



Principal Investigators: Zhiyuan Li, Ananth Grama and Ahmed Sameh

Participating Students: Lixia Liu, Russel Meyers, Dasarath Weeratunge

Current Sponsors: National Science Foundation

Department of Computer Science continues its cutting-edge investigation of compiler techniques for high-end computing systems. Compiler prototypes are developed to support experimentation of advanced compiler techniques. Such prototypes are also used as tools for the study of various performance issues concerning high-end application programs and high-end computing systems. Some of the recent results: Drs. Zhiyuan Li, Ananth Grama, and Ahmed Sameh are also investigating a programming interface that supports the development of loosely synchronized numerical algorithms to overcome memory and communication latencies on high-end computing systems. Experiments show that, when applied properly, large sparse-matrix problems derived from PDEs can be solved significantly faster by more relaxed dataflow and synchronization than using the strict dataflow model in the original algorithms. As an example, this figure shows the good speedup (over a single processor) achieved by the new method applied to a two-dimensional multi-grid problem, in contrast to the poor speedup obtained by the original code. Notice that the convergence rates of both versions are nearly the same, as this figure shows.

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