CODEWITHSUNDEEP
language-agnosticmpidistributed-computingmessage-passing
akappa
akappa

Reputation: 10490

Performances evaluation with Message Passing

I have to build a distributed application, using MPI. One of the decision that I have to take is how to map instances of classes into process (and then into machines), in order to take maximum advantages from a distributed environment.

My question is: there is a model that let me choose the better mapping? I mean, some arrangements are surely wrong (for ex., putting in two different machines two objects that should process together a fairly large amount of data, in a sequential manner, without a stream of tokens to process), but there's a systematically way to determine such wrong arrangements, determined by flow of execution, message complexity, time taken by the computation done by the algorithmic components?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 246

Answers (3)

Phil Miller
Phil Miller

Reputation: 38118

A practical solution to this would be using a different model of distributed-memory parallel programming, that directly addresses your concerns. I work on the Charm++ programming system, whose model is that of individual objects sending messages from one to another. The runtime system facilitates automatic mapping of these objects to available processors, to account for issues of load balance and communication locality.

Upvotes: 0

Jim Hunziker
Jim Hunziker

Reputation: 15380

Another thing you might try is the Join Calculus. I've found examples of programming with it to be surprisingly intuitive, and I think it's well grounded in theory. I'm not sure why it hasn't caught on more.

The other approach is the Pi Calculus, and I think that might be more popular, though it seems harder to understand.

Upvotes: 0

Jim Hunziker
Jim Hunziker

Reputation: 15380

Well, there are data flow diagrams. Those can help identify parallelism's opportunities and pitfalls. The references on the wikipedia page might give you some more theoretical grounding.

When I worked at Lockheed Martin, I was exposed to CSIM, a tool they developed for modeling algorithm mapping to processing blocks.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions