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With the advent of hardware technologies, high-performance parallel computers and commodity clusters are becoming affordable. However, complexity of parallel application development remains one of the major obstacles towards the mainstream adoption of parallel computing. As one of the solution techniques, researchers are actively investigating the pattern-based approaches to parallel programming. As re-usable components, patterns are intended to ease the design and development phases of a parallel applications. While using patterns, a developer supplies the application specific code-components whereas the underlying environment generates most of the code for parallelization. PAS (Parallel Architectural Skeleton) is one such pattern-based parallel programming model and tool, which defines the architectural aspects of parallel computational patterns. Like many other pattern-based models and tools, the PAS model was hampered by its lack of extensibility, i.e., lacking of support for the systematic addition of new skeletons to an existing skeleton repository. Lack of extensibility significantly reduces the flexibility and hence the usability of a particular approach. SuperPAS is an extension of PAS that defines a model for systematically designing and implementing PAS skeletons by a skeleton designer. The newly implemented skeletons can subsequently be used by an application developer. SuperPAS model is realized through a Skeleton Description Language (SDL), which assists both a skeleton designer and an application developer. The paper discusses the SuperPAS model through examples that use the SDL. The paper also discusses some of the recent usability and performance studies, which demonstrate that SuperPAS is a practical and usable parallel programming model and tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spite of the advent of high performance parallel computers and commodity clusters, complexity of parallel application development remains one of the major obstacles towards the mainstream adoption of parallel computing. Researchers are constantly investigating different approaches to reduce parallel application development time and increase productivity. As re-usable components, patterns have gained popularity in the sequential programming domain. Subsequently, several pattern-based parallel programming environments (PPEs) have been proposed to facilitate parallel application development procedure. Unfortunately, most of these PPEs lack the required flexibility in order to develop real-life parallel applications. In this paper, we describe the features of the EPAS (Extended Parallel Architectural Skeleton) PPE that enables development of complex parallel applications. We investigate and design the required patterns, and then use them to develop a parallel data cube computing application. Finally, we present the performance of the developed applications and discuss the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complexity of parallel application development has been one of the major obstacles towards the mainstream adoption of parallel programming. In order to hide some of these complexities, researchers have been actively investigating the pattern-based approaches to parallel programming. As reusable components, patterns are intended to ease the design and development phases of parallel applications. Parallel Architectural Skeleton (PAS) is one such pattern-based parallel programming model which describes the architectural aspects of parallel patterns. Like many other pattern-based parallel programming models and tools, the benefits of PAS were offset by the difficulties in extending PAS. EPAS is an extension of PAS that addresses this issue. Using EPAS, a skeleton designer can design new skeletons and add them to the skeleton repository (i.e., extensibility). EPAS also makes the PAS model more flexible by defining composition of skeletons. In this paper, we describe the model of EPAS and also discuss some of the recent usability and performance studies. The studies demonstrate that EPAS is a practical and usable parallel programming model and tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Application of pattern-based approaches to parallel programming is an active area of research today. The main objective of pattern-based approaches to parallel programming is to facilitate the reuse of frequently occurring structures for parallelism whereby a user supplies mostly the application specific code-components and the programming environment generates most of the code for parallelization. Parallel Architectural Skeleton (PAS) is such a pattern-based parallel programming model and environment. The PAS model provides a generic way of describing the architectural/structural aspects of patterns in message-passing parallel computing. Application development using PAS ishierarchical, similar to conventional parallel programming using MPI, however with the added benefit of reusability and high level patterns. Like most other pattern-based parallel programming models, the benefits of PAS were offset by some of its drawbacks such as difficulty in: (1) extending PAS and (2) skeleton composition. SuperPAS is an extension of PAS that addresses these issues. SuperPAS provides a skeleton description language for the generic PAS. Using SuperPAS, a skeleton developer can extend PAS by adding new skeletons to the repository (i.e., extensibility). SuperPAS also makes the PAS system more flexible by defining composition of skeletons. In this paper, we describe SuperPAS and elaborate its use through examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]