Harnessing parallelism in multicore clusters with the all-pairs and wavefront abstractions

Both distributed systems and multicore computers are difficult programming environments. Although the expert programmer may be able to tune distributed and multicore computers to achieve high performance, the non-expert may struggle to achieve a program that even functions correctly. We argue that high level abstractions are an effective way of making parallel computing accessible to the non-expert. An abstraction is a regularly structured framework into which a user may plug in simple sequential programs to create very large parallel programs. By virtue of a regular structure and declarative specification, abstractions may be materialized on distributed, multicore, and distributed multicore systems with robust performance across a wide range of problem sizes. In previous work, we presented the All-Pairs abstraction for computing on distributed systems of single CPUs. In this paper, we extend All-Pairs to multicore systems, and introduce Wavefront, which represents a number of problems in economics and bioinformatics. We demonstrate good scaling of both abstractions up to 32-cores on one machine and hundreds of cores in a distributed system.