Exploiting the Parallelism Exposed by Partial Evaluation

We describe an approach to parallel compilation that seeks to harness the vast amount of fine-grain parallelism that is exposed through partial evaluation of numerically-intensive scientific programs. We have constructed a compiler for the Supercomputer Toolkit parallel processor that uses partial evaluation to break down data abstractions and program structure, producing huge basic blocks that contain large amounts of fine-grain parallelism. We show that this fine-grain prarllelism can be effectively utilized even on coarse-grain parallel architectures by selectively grouping operations together so as to adjust the parallelism grain-size to match the inter-processor communication capabilities of the target architecture.

Aeroacoustics on Non-Dedicated Workstations

The simulation of subsonic aeroacoustic problems such as the flow-generated sound of wind instruments is well suited for parallel computing on a cluster of non-dedicated workstations. Simulations are demonstrated which employ 20 non-dedicated Hewlett-Packard workstations (HP9000/715), and achieve comparable performance on this problem as a 64-node CM-5 dedicated supercomputer with vector units. The success of the present approach depends on the low communication requirements of the problem (low communication to computation ratio) which arise from the coarse-grain decomposition of the problem and the use of local-interaction methods. Many important problems may be suitable for this type of parallel computing including computer vision, circuit simulation, and other subsonic flow problems.