Parallel Programming Patterns: Part 1

Thursday Mar 06, 2008

Recently we released MPI Development environment for Netbeans IDE, and this series is a consolidated summary of Parallel Programming Patterns implemented in the Plugin. The first Pattern which we will see is SPMD(Single Process Multiple Data) Pattern. This is a technique used to achieve data level parallelism. One of the dominant style of parallel programming, where all processors use the same program, though each has its own data, SPMD pattern exploits data parallelism in applications where a large mass of data of a uniform type needs the same instruction performed on it. The data is divided among processes to be independently operated. The example provided in the MPI Netbeans plugin shows following:

1. An array of elements is created on main process which is then distributed amongst other processes.
2. All processes do independent processing of data which is sent to them.
3. If the main process wants, it can collect the data from other processes for some final processing, etc.

For more details please refer to MPI Plugin Download page and its Development guide. This is the link to Parallel Programming Patterns documentation.

MPI Development environment for Netbeans IDE

Tuesday Aug 14, 2007

Recently we released a MPI plugin for Netbeans. The purpose of this plugin is to allow application developers to access Netbeans platform to develop, test, debug MPI applications for the Sun Grid Compute Utility. This plugin includes an early access version of the new MPI Development Plugin for NetBeans(tm) IDE, which is targeted at C/C++ developers who are working with MPI applications that can be modeled as a set of independent, compute-bound tasks. The software is published under the GNU General Public License.

MPI Development Plugin for NetBeans(tm) IDE project offers following in its current early access state:

• MPI programming model to simplify the design and development of C/C++ MPI applications.
• Netbeans IDE framework built in features enhanced to support the efficient execution of C/C++ MPI applications on the Sun Grid Compute Utility.
• MPI testing plug-in for the NetBeans IDE to ease local development and testing of C/C++ MPI applications.
• Pre built collection of Sample MPI applications for illustrating effective use of Parallel Programming Patterns to build C/C++ MPI applications for Sun Grid.

Learn More:

• Developing MPI Applications in the NetBeans IDE
• MPI application development plugin: Parallel Programming Pattern examples

More in this series:

In the next posts, look out for Parallel Programming Patterns and related examples for this plugin, which we have developed.