Automatic Generation of Self-Scheduling Programs

Ian T. Foster

Abstract: Techniques are described for the automatic generation of self-scheduling parallel programs. Both scheduling algorithms and the concurrent components of applications are expressed in a high-level concurrent language. Partitioning and data dependency information are expressed by simple control statements, which may be generated either automatically or manually. A self-scheduling compiler, implemented as a source-to-source transformation, takes application code, control statements, and scheduling routines and generates a new program that can schedule its own execution on a parallel computer. The approach has several advantages compared to previous proposals. It generates programs that are portable over a wide range of parallel computers. There is no need to embed special control structures in application programs. The use of a high-level language to express applications and scheduling algorithms facilitates the development, modification, and reuse of parallel programs.<