Compiling and supporting skeletons on MPP

Parallel programming needs a high level programming model in which compilers and run time supports take care of traditionally intractable problems related to efficient usage of the target machine (mapping, scheduling, data decomposition, etc.). The matter of designing a real system providing such a model is highly simplified by constructing the parallel programs using scalable skeletons which capture common structural components of parallel computations. The key problem is the efficient implementation of programs composed of several nested skeleton instances. This requires optimizing the resulting process graph structure and map it on the available resources in order to balance load and minimize communications. The paper describes how this can be done, despite of the intractability of the problems involved, exploiting the 'structure' imposed by the skeleton approach.