GAP/MPI: Facilitating parallelism

Abstract

The goal of this work is to overcome the learning barriers faced when first using parallelism. Currently, in order to parallelize a system such as GAP, one must embed a message passing library such as MPI, with many routines and many parameters. GAP/MPI provides a simple, task-oriented interface sitting above the MPI library. The system presents the end-user with a single SPMD (single program, multiple data) environment in GAP: an existing, familiar interactive language. In GAP/MPI one describes the end application in terms of high level tasks, which are invoked by a single procedure call in GAP/MPI. This eliminates the complexities of a message passing library, such as encoding a message in a suitable data structure, message synchronization, communication topologies and deadlock avoidance.