Dynamic Process Composition and Communication Patterns in Irregularly Structured Applications

In this paper we describe one experiment in which a new co-ordination language, called MANIFOLD, is used to restructure an existing sequential Fortran 77 code from computational fluid dynamics (CFD), into a parallel application. MANIFOLD is a co-ordination language developed at CWI (Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica) in the Netherlands. It is very well suited for applications involving dynamic process creation and dynamically changing (ir)regular communication patterns among sets of independent concurrent cooperating processes. With a simple but generic master/worker protocol, written in the MANIFOLD language, we are able to reuse the existing code without rethinking or rewriting it. The performance evaluation of a standard 3D CFD problem shows that MANIFOLD performs very well. Copyright  2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.