An Interactive Environment for Data Partitioning and Distribution

Abstract

An a.pproach to distributed riieiiiory pa.ralle1 programining that has recently become popular is oue where the programmer explicitly specilies t.he data decoiriposit.ion using language extensions, and a. compiler geuerates all the coiriinunicatioii. While this frees the prograiniuer froin tlie tedium of thinking about message-passing, no assistance is provided in determining the data decouiposition scheme that gives the best performance on tlie target machine. In this paper, we propose an interactive software tool that provides assistance for this very task. The proposed tool also computes performance estimates for any chosen data partitioning scheme, allowing tlie programmer to experiment with several different stra.tegies without ever running the program on the rnacliine.