A Graphical User Interface for Composing Parallel Computation in the STAPL Skeleton Library

Abstract

Parallel programming is a quickly growing field in computer science. It involves splitting the computation among multiple processors to decrease the run time of programs. The computations assigned to a processor can depend on the results of another computation. This dependence in- troduces a partial ordering between tasks that requires coordination of the execution of the tasks assigned to each processor. OpenMP and MPI are current heavily utilized approaches and require the use of low level primitives to express very simple scientific applications. Newer environments, such as STAPL, Charm++, and Chapel, among others, raise the level of abstraction, but the challenge of specifying the flow of data between computations remains. However, graphical user interfaces (GUIs) can simplify this task. The purpose of this project is to create a GUI that al- lows a user to specify a parallel application written in STAPL by composing high-level components and by defining the flow of data between them. The idea is that the user creates the layout of the code using shapes and lines, which produce the composition on an underlying layer, eliminating the need to write complex composition specifications directly in the code.