Integrating HPF in a skeleton based parallel language

Although HPF allows programmers to express data-parallel computations in a portable, high-level way, it is widely accepted that many important parallel applications cannot be efficiently implemented following a pure data-parallel paradigm. For these applications, rather than having a single data-parallel program, it is more profitable to subdivide the whole computation into several data-parallel pieces, where the various pieces run concurrently and co-operate, thus exploiting task parallelism. This paper discusses the integration of HPF with SkIE, a skeleton based coordination language implemented on top of MPI (Message Passing Interface), which permits to describe complex computational parallel structures. We show how HPF can be used inside common forms of parallelism, e.g. pipeline and processor farms, and we present experimental results regarding a sample application.