Application-Driven Development of an Integrated Tool Environment for Distributed-Memory Parallel Processors

The Joint CSCS-ETH/NEC Collaboration in Parallel Processing comprises the development of an integrated tool environment together with applications and algorithms for distributed-memory parallel processors (DMPPs). Tool and application developers interact closely: the requirements of the tools are defined by the needs of the application developers, and once an application requirement becomes an integral part of the tool environment, the tools ease parallelization of similar applications and whole application classes. Additional features of the project are the use of a standardized DMPP high-level programming language (HPF) and low-level message-passing interface (MPI). The tool environment integrates parallelization support, a parallel debugger, and a performance monitor and analyzer. Applicationsalready investigated include unstructured problems. In this paper we summarize the tool and application development efforts and show preliminary performance results of three applications effectively parallelized on two DMPP platforms with the assistance of our tool environment.