Tema da Tese: A framework for heterogeneous many-core machines
Autor: Bruno Silvestre Medeiros
Programa Doutoral: Informatics (PDINF)
Orientador: João Luís Ferreira Sobral
Data de Defesa: 27/09/2019

Resumo:

Software development is known for being a complex task, especially when parallelism is involved. This complexity can, however, be reduced by dividing the software into smaller manageable modules. This philosophy is embraced by modular programming, which promotes the separation of concerns in well-defined modules. Unfortunately, traditional parallel programming models (e.g., OpenMP and MPI) are typically non- modular, leading to the mix of parallelism- and domain- related concerns.
This thesis exploits the notion that modularity, pluggability (i.e., the ability to (un)plug modules without modifying the base code), and composability are key properties to make the process of developing parallel applications less complex. The first step towards achieving these properties is the separation of the parallelism-related concerns from the domain concerns and consequent encapsulation in proper modules. This thesis exploited the use of aspect-oriented programming (AOP) to achieve the separation of parallelism-related concerns and combined it with a methodology based on structured programming and design rules (i.e., designing the domain code accordingly). The result is an aspect-oriented framework that enables the development of modular parallel applications. This framework intrinsically supports the development of applications with hybrid parallelism by composing, in a non-invasive fashion, several parallelism-related modules with a given domain code. This framework shines by combining the efficiency and expressiveness of popular HPC parallel programming models with the modular features of aspectand object-oriented (OO) design.
As a result of studying AOP in the context of parallelism, we introduce the idea of parallelism layers, which combines the simplicity of well-known OO concepts (i.e., class extension and method overriding) with the flexibility of AOP. On the one hand, this combination enables the users of our framework to add parallelism to domain code, using familiar concepts analogous to class extension and method overriding but without the limitations of OO inheritance. On the other hand, programmers can exploit the advanced features of AOP, which, among others, are helpful to extend the functionality of the framework. Hence, parallelism layers provide a simple yet
flexible approach for the development of parallel applications. Finally, to reduce the complexity of parallel programming even further, we enhanced the parallelism layers with a methodology and a workflow to parallelize applications – including hybrid parallelizations – in an incremental and structured manner.
We evaluated the performance and programmability of our framework in comparison to other approaches by using a set of case studies and executing them in a cluster of multicores. We illustrated, using our framework and workflow, the entire process of developing efficient and modular parallelizations – from the sequential up to the hybrid version. Moreover, we show that our framework and workflow help to find more efficient parallelizations than the ones initially implemented. These results showed that parallelism layers are ideal for the quick prototyping and testing of different parallel strategies.