Speaker
Karl Fürlinger (University of Munich)
Description
The two most common approaches for parallel programming are message
passing (for example using MPI, the message passing interface) and
threading (for example using OpenMP or Pthreads). Threading is generally
considered an easier and more straightforward solution for parallel
programming but it can generally only be used on a single shared memory
node. MPI, on the other hand, scales to the full size of today's
machines, but it requires a more complex planning and orchestration of
data distribution and movement.
PGAS (Partitioned Global Address Space) approaches try to combine the
best of both worlds, providing a threading abstraction for programming
large distributed memory machines. Data locality is made explicit in
order to be able to take advantage of it for performance and energy
efficiency reasons. The talk will give an introduction to the concept of
PGAS programming and provide examples using UPC (unified parallel C).
The research project DASH, which provides a realization of the PGAS
model in the form of a C++ template library, will also be introduced in
the talk.
