Writing portable programs that perform well on multiple platforms or for varying input sizes and types can be very difficult because performance is often sensitive to the system architecture, the runtime environment, and input data characteristics. This is even more challenging on parallel and distributed systems due to the wide variety of system architectures. One way to address this problem is to adaptively select the best parallel algorithm for the current input data and system from a set of functionally equivalent algorithmic options. Toward this goal, we have developed a general framework for adaptive algorithm selection for use in the Standard Template Adaptive Parallel Library (STAPL). Our framework uses machine learning techniques to analyze data collected by STAPL installation benchmarks and to determine tests that will select among algorithmic options at run-time. We apply a prototype implementation of our framework to two important parallel operations, sorting and matrix multiplication, on multiple platforms and show that the framework determines run-time tests that correctly select the best performing algorithm from among several competing algorithmic options in 86-100% of the cases studied, depending on the operation and the system.

Abstract. The Standard Template Adaptive Parallel Library (STAPL) is a parallel library designed as a superset of the ANSI C++ Standard Template Library (STL). It is sequentially consistent for functions with the same name, and executes on uni-or multi-processor systems that utilize shared or distributed memory. STAPL is implemented using simple parallel extensions of C++ that currently provide a SPMD model of parallelism, and supports nested parallelism. The library is intended to be general purpose, but emphasizes irregular programs to allow the exploitation of parallelism for applications which use dynamically linked data structures such as particle transport calculations, molecular dynamics, geometric modeling, and graph algorithms. STAPL provides several different algorithms for some library routines, and selects among them adaptively at runtime. STAPL can replace STL automatically by invoking a preprocessing translation phase. In the applications studied, the performance of translated code was within 5% of the results obtained using STAPL directly. STAPL also provides functionality to allow the user to further optimize the code and achieve additional performance gains. We present results obtained using STAPL for a molecular dynamics code and a particle transport code. MotivationIn sequential computing, standardized libraries have proven to be valuable tools for simplifying the program development process by providing routines for common operations that allow programmers to concentrate on higher level problems. Similarly, libraries of elementary, generic, parallel algorithms provide important building blocks for parallel applications and specialized libraries [7,6,20]. Due to the added complexity of parallel programming, the potential impact of libraries could be even more profound than for sequential computing. Indeed, we believe parallel libraries are crucial for moving parallel computing into the mainstream since they offer the only viable means for achieving scalable performance across a variety of applications and architectures with programming efforts comparable to those of developing sequential codes. In particular, properly designed parallel libraries could insulate less experienced users

The Standard Template Adaptive Parallel Library (STAPL) is a parallel programming infrastructure that extends C++ with support for parallelism. It includes a collection of distributed data structures called pContainers that are thread-safe, concurrent objects, i.e., shared objects that provide parallel methods that can be invoked concurrently. In this work, we present the STAPL Parallel Container Framework (PCF), that is designed to facilitate the development of generic parallel containers. We introduce a set of concepts and a methodology for assembling a pContainer from existing sequential or parallel containers, without requiring the programmer to deal with concurrency or data distribution issues. The PCF provides a large number of basic parallel data structures (e.g., pArray, pList, pVector, pMatrix, pGraph, pMap, pSet). The PCF provides a class hierarchy and a composition mechanism that allows users to extend and customize the current container base for improved application expressivity and performance. We evaluate STAPL pContainer performance on a CRAY XT4 massively parallel system and show that pContainer methods, generic pAlgorithms, and different applications provide good scalability on more than 16,000 processors.

The Standard Template Adaptive Parallel Library (STAPL) is a parallel programming infrastructure that extends C++ with support for parallelism. It includes a collection of distributed data structures called pContainers that are thread-safe, concurrent objects, i.e., shared objects that provide parallel methods that can be invoked concurrently. In this work, we present the STAPL Parallel Container Framework (PCF), that is designed to facilitate the development of generic parallel containers. We introduce a set of concepts and a methodology for assembling a pContainer from existing sequential or parallel containers, without requiring the programmer to deal with concurrency or data distribution issues. The PCF provides a large number of basic parallel data structures (e.g., pArray, pList, pVector, pMatrix, pGraph, pMap, pSet). The PCF provides a class hierarchy and a composition mechanism that allows users to extend and customize the current container base for improved application expressivity and performance. We evaluate STAPL pContainer performance on a CRAY XT4 massively parallel system and show that pContainer methods, generic pAlgorithms, and different applications provide good scalability on more than 16,000 processors.

The protein folding problem is to study how