University of Houston
Department of Computer Science

In partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

Lei Huang
will present his dissertation

Extending OpenMP on Distributed Memory Systems via Global Arrays

Abstract
Distributed Memory Systems (DMS) or Computer Clusters have been widely deployed in scientific computing as well as business processing due to its scalable performance while at a very modest cost. The importance of a parallel programming API for Distributed Memory System that facilitates programmer productivity is increasingly recognized. OpenMP is the de facto parallel programming standard for shared memory systems with high productivity of programming; however, it is not immediately available for distributed memory systems.

The goal of this research is to extend the high level language OpenMP to Distributed Memory System to achieve the ease of programming. In this thesis, we proposed a novel approach to extending OpenMP to Distributed Memory Systems, in which we translate OpenMP into Global Arrays, a library-based programming model. We experimented the approach with a variety of benchmarks on different cluster platforms, and implemented a basic translation in the OpenUH compiler. The results are quite encouraging. Moreover, we explored the compiler technologies and language extensions to increase the attractiveness of the approach. A new language extension has been proposed and currently under active discussion by OpenMP ARB for the new language features in OpenMP 3.0. The work has introduced and demonstrated the feasibility of an easy and more productive programming model for both shared and distributed memory systems. We believe that the work meets an increasing need for high productivity and high performance parallel programming models on the existing and emerging hierarchical parallel platforms and for grand challenge applications.

Date: Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Time: 5:30 PM
Place: 550 PGH

Faculty, students, and the general public are invited.
Advisor: Dr. Barbara Chapman