A Microservice Approach for a Cellular Automata Parallel Programming Environment

Abstract

This paper presents an architecture for a parallel programming environment designed to assist the process of writing parallel programs. The proposed architecture allows the integration of several tools such as parallel programming skeletons and parallelizing compilers, among others. On the one hand, parallel programming skeletons simplify the design of parallel algorithms. On the other hand, parallelizing compilers rely on compiler capabilities to translate sequential programs into ones capable of using multiple processing units (CPU/GPU) found in personal computers (PCs). The technological solution presented in this work follows a microservices-oriented approach. This approach eases the integration of new parallel programming tools in the existing deployment through well-known protocols and existing services. We show how the aforementioned parallel programming tools were integrated to support the coding and parallelization of a general purpose cellular automata. Since the parallelization rely on the capabilities underlying to each tool, the focus of this work is not to deal with an efficient cellular automata parallelization. Instead, a promising microservice approach to the development of an extensible and scalable parallel programming environment is presented.