Athapascan Runtime: Efficiency for Irregular Problems

This paper introduces a multi-threaded, portable, parallel programming runtime system, called Athapascan-Ob. It is designed to support the efficient processing of large irregular problems. Parallel machines are considered as generic networks of heterogeneous symmetric multiprocessors, with remote thread creation, message exchange and remote memory accesses. Athapascan-Ob can dynamically map fine granularity computations on such machines and overlap communication delays with computation. These features should help to perform better load sharing and achieve better performance.