Communicating data-parallel tasks: an MPI library for HPF

High Performance Fortran (HPF) has emerged as a standard dialect of Fortran for data-parallel computing. However, HPF does not support task parallelism or heterogeneous computing adequately. This paper presents a summary of our work on a library-based approach to support task parallelism, using MPI as a coordination layer for HPF. This library enables a wide variety of applications, such as multidisciplinary simulations and pipeline computations, to take advantage of combined task and data parallelism. An HPF banding for MPI raises several interface and communication issues. We discuss these issues and describe our implementation of an HPF/MPI library that operates with a commercial HPF compiler. We also evaluate the performance of our library using a synthetic communication benchmark and a multiblock application.