Moving beyond message passing. Experiments with a distributed-data model

Abstract

A message-passing model provides a natural and efficient parallel implementation for many applications in chemical physics on MIMD machines. However, although the distinction between local and non-local memory is at the very heart of writing efficient parallel programs, message passing leaves all responsibility for data management to the applications. This has significant, detrimental implications for both ease of programming and efficient use of shared and distributed resources. Examined here is a simple model which increments message passing with Linda-like tools for the manipulation of distributed-data structures. This is applied to common algorithms in chemical physics.