Project Supervisor:
Dr Stephen Jarvis, Computer Science
Title: New Approaches to Programming Scientific Applications and Libraries: A
Demonstration of UPC to Wavefront Algorithsms
Brief: Our research group in Computer Science has had a lot of discussions with various
people from the US and UK National Labs with regards a “new approach” to programming
scientific/numerical applications and libraries.
There seems to be some focus on new parallel programming methodologies – exploring these
in the context of what performance can be achieved and how the runtimes can be optimised.
Since we are doing quite a bit of work with wavefront algorithms, e.g. Sweep3D
(http://www.c3.lanl.gov/pal/software/sweep3d/sweep3d-2.2b.tar.gz), LU etc, we would like
to launch a project writing/converting one of these applications to a programming paradigm
such as UPC or Co-Array Fortran. We favour UPC (http:/upc.lbl.gov/), since it seems the
most mature and already the basic communication libraries are well optimised. Also, UPC is
working on the 11 TFLOP/s cluster and the performance seems quite good for some of the
small NAS-PB runs.
We could try either writing the full sweep application or developing a library first off. The
advantage here is that we could look at threading and network communications within a
single UPC-code base.