Hybrid bulk synchronous parallelism library for clustered smp architectures

Abstract

This paper presents the design and implementation of BSP++, a C++ parallel programming library based on the Bulk Synchronous Parallelism model to perform high performance computing on both SMP and SPMD architectures using OpenMPI and MPI. We show how C++ support for genericity provides a functional and intuitive user interface which still delivers a large fraction of performance compared to hand written code. We show how the library structure and programming models allow simple hybrid programming by composing BSP super-steps and letting BSP++ handling the middleware interface. The performance and scalability of this approach are then assessed by various benchmarks of classic HPC application kernels and distributed algorithms on various hybrid machines including a subset of the GRID5000 grid.