On the Abstraction of Message-Passing Communications Using Algorithmic Skeletons

This is an initial case on exploring the application of algorithmic skeletons to abstract low-level interprocess communication in MPI. The main purpose is intended to illustrate the competitive performance demonstrated by the skeletal approach when compared to utilization of the pure MPI, whilst providing an abstraction with reusability advantages. This initial work involves the implementation of the Wagar’s hyperquicksort algorithm in conjunction with the MPI-based eSkel skeleton library. The reported results compare three MPI-based implementations of hyperquicksort. Firstly a canonic MPI one; secondly, two implementations using the MPI-based skeletal library eSkel . Lastly, the S3L sort routine, part of its optimized numerical libraries from Sun, is employed as baseline. This overall comparison demonstrates that the use of algorithmic skeletons caused a slight performance degradation, while providing some promising guidance on the use of abstraction for low-level communication operations using the eSkel model.