Initial Experiences with the BEC Parallel Programming Environment

Bundle-exchange-compute (BEC) is a new virtual shared memory parallel programming environment for distributed-memory machines. Different from and complementary to other global address space (GAS) programming model research efforts, BEC has built-in efficient support for unstructured applications that inherently require high-volume random fine-grained communication, such as parallel graph algorithms, sparse-matrices, and large-scale physics simulations. In BEC, the global view of shared data structures enables ease of algorithm design and programming; and for good application performance, fine-grained (random) accesses to shared data are automatically and dynamically bundled together for coarse-grained message-passing. BEC frees the users from explicit management of data distribution, locality, and communication. Therefore, BEC is much easier to program than MPI, while achieving comparable application performance. This paper presents some initial BEC applications, which show that simple BEC programs can match very complex and highly optimized MPI codes.