Information hiding in parallel programs

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Abstract
A fundamental principle in program design is to isolate difficult or changeable design decisions. Application of this principle to parallel programs requires identification of decisions that are difficult or subject to change, and the development of techniques for hiding these decisions. We experiment with three complex applications, and identify mapping, communication, and scheduling as areas in which decisions are particularly problematic. We develop computational abstractions that hide such decisions, and show that these abstractions can be used to develop elegant solutions to programming problems. In particular, they allow us to encode common structures, such as transforms, reductions, and meshes, as software cells and templates that can reused in different applications. An important characteristic of these structures is that they do not incorporate mapping, communication, or scheduling decisions: these aspects of the design are specified separately, when composing existing structures to form applications. This separation of concerns allows the same cells and templates to be reused in different contexts.

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