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Fortran RED — A Retargetable Environment for Automatic Data Layout

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Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing (LCPC 1998)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1656))

Abstract

The proliferation of parallel platforms over the last ten years has been dramatic. Parallel platforms come in different flavors, including desk-top multiprocessor PCs and workstations with a few processors, networks of PCs and workstations, and supercomputers with hundreds of processors or more. This diverse collection of parallel platforms provide not only computing cycles, but other important resources for scientific computing as well, such as large amounts of main memory and fast I/O capabilities. As a result of the proliferation of parallel platforms, the “typical profile” of a potential user of such systems has changed considerably. The specialist user who has a good understanding of the complexities of the target parallel system has been replaced by a user who is largely unfamiliar with the underlying system characteristics. While the specialist’s main concern is peak performance, the non-specialist user may be willing to trade off performance for ease of programming.

Recent languages such as High Performance Fortran (HPF) and SGI Parallel Fortran are a significant step towards making parallel platforms truly usable for a broadening user community. However, non-trivial user input is required to produce efficient parallel programs. The main challenge for a user is to understand the performance implications of a specified data layout, which requires knowledge about issues such as code generation and analysis strategies of the HPF compiler and its node compiler, and the performance characteristics of the target architecture. This paper discusses our preliminary experiences with the design and implementation of Fortran RED, a tool that supports Fortran as a deterministic, sequential programming model on different parallel target systems. The tool is not part of a compiler. Fortran RED uses HPF as its intermediate program representation since the language is portable across many parallel platforms, and commercial and research HPF compilers are widely available. Fortran RED is able to support different target HPF compilers and target architectures, and allows multi-dimensional distributions in addition to dynamic remapping. This paper focuses on the discussion of the performance prediction component of the tool and reports preliminary results for a single scientific kernel on two target systems, namely PGI’s and IBM’s HPF compilers with IBM’s SP-2 as the target architecture.

This research was supported by DARPA contract DABT 63-93-C-0064 and experiments were conducted using resources at the Cornell Theory Center.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University, New Bruswick, NJ, USA

    Ulrich Kremer

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  1. Ulrich Kremer
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599-3175, USA

    Siddhartha Chatterjee  & Jan F. Prins  & 

  2. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California at San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA, 92093-0114, USA

    Larry Carter  & Jeanne Ferrante  & 

  3. Department of Computer Science, Purdue University, 1398 Computer Science Building, West Lafayette, IN, 47907, USA

    Zhiyuan Li

  4. Intel Corporation, 2200 Mission College Boulevard, RN6-18, Santa Clara, CA, 95052, USA

    David Sehr

  5. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA

    Pen-Chung Yew

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© 1999 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Kremer, U. (1999). Fortran RED — A Retargetable Environment for Automatic Data Layout. In: Chatterjee, S., et al. Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing. LCPC 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1656. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48319-5_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48319-5_10

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-66426-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-48319-9

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