SuperPAS: A Parallel Architectural Skeleton Model Supporting Extensibility and Skeleton Composition

Abstract

Application of pattern-based approaches to parallel programming is an active area of research today. The main objective of pattern-based approaches to parallel programming is to facilitate the reuse of frequently occurring structures for parallelism whereby a user supplies mostly the application specific code-components and the programming environment generates most of the code for parallelization. Parallel Architectural Skeleton (PAS) is such a pattern-based parallel programming model and environment. The PAS model provides a generic way of describing the architectural/structural aspects of patterns in message-passing parallel computing. Application development using PAS ishierarchical, similar to conventional parallel programming using MPI, however with the added benefit of reusability and high level patterns. Like most other pattern-based parallel programming models, the benefits of PAS were offset by some of its drawbacks such as difficulty in: (1) extending PAS and (2) skeleton composition. SuperPAS is an extension of PAS that addresses these issues. SuperPAS provides a skeleton description language for the generic PAS. Using SuperPAS, a skeleton developer can extend PAS by adding new skeletons to the repository (i.e., extensibility). SuperPAS also makes the PAS system more flexible by defining composition of skeletons. In this paper, we describe SuperPAS and elaborate its use through examples.