Towards Realistic Implementations of External Memory Algorithms Using a Coarse Grained Paradigm

We present an extension to SSCRAP, our C++ environment for the development of coarse grained algorithms, that allows for easy execution of programs in an external memory setting. Our environment is well suited for regular as well as irregular problems and scales from low end PCs to high end clusters and mainframe technology. It allows running algorithms designed on a high level of abstraction in one of the known coarse grained parallel models without modification in an external memory setting. The first tests presented here in this paper show a very efficient behavior in the context of out-of-core computation (mapping memory to disk files), and even some (marginal) speed up when used to reduced cache misses for in-core computation.