TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES FOR AUTOMATIC DATA LAYOUT - A CASE-STUDY

Parallel architectures with physically distributed memory providing co mputing cycles and large amounts of memory are becoming more and more common. To make such architectures truly usable, programming models an d support tools are needed to ease the programming effort for these pa rallel systems. Automatic data distribution tools and techniques play an important role in achieving that goal. This paper discusses state-o f-the-art approaches to fully automatic data and computation partition ing. A kernel application is used as a case study to illustrate the ma in differences of four representative approaches. The paper concludes with a discussion of promising future research directions for automati c data layout. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.