NHSE Software Catalog

CHAOS

url

ftp://hpsl.cs.umd.edu/pub/chaos_distribution/

title_line

runtime library for parallelizing Fortran and C programs
with irregular data access patterns

contact

Alan Sussman / als@cs.umd.edu

abstract

The Chaos library is a set of software primitives that are designed to
efficiently handle irregular problems on distributed memory systems. It
is a superset of the Parti library. These primitives have been designed
to ease the implementation of computational problems on parallel
architecture machines by relieving users of low-level machine specific
issues. The design philosophy has been to leave the original
(sequential) source codes essentially unaltered, with the exception of
the introduction of various calls to the Chaos primitives which are
embedded in the codes at the appropriate locations. These primitives
allow the distribution and retrieval of data from the numerous processor
local memories.
In distributed memory systems, arrays can be partitioned among local
memories of processors. These partitioned arrays are called distributed
arrays.
Chaos provides primitives to map arrays onto processors.
Chaos also provides a set of primitives that carry out optimizations at
runtime to reduce both the number of messages and the volume of
interprocessor communication.

keywords

data partitioning; distributed memory multiprocessor; irregular
problem; runtime system

description

http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/hpsl/compilers/base_chaos.html

environment

Any distributed memory system that supports message passing or
distributed shared memory
(currently implemented on Intel iPSC/860 and Paragon, IBM SP1/2,
TMC CM5, Cray T3D, Stanford DASH, network of workstations via
PVM)