[Dune-devel] [GSoC 2013] Project 1

[Markus Blatt]

Hi Ravi,

On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 08:41:51AM +0530, Ravi Teja Mullapudi wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am Ravi Teja Mullapudi. I am interested in the project "Add Thread
> Support to Parallel Index Sets".  I am currently enrolled as a Masters
> Student at the Multicore Computing Lab <http://mcl.csa.iisc.ernet.in/>, Indian
> Institute of Science Bangalore. Easing communication generation is one of
> the topics I am interested in. I have worked on scaling stencil
> computations and linear algebra kernels on our local cluster
> (MPI+OpenMP).

Nice background.

>  I am recently working on implementing the same algorithms in a higher
> level abstraction Intel Concurrent
> Collections<http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-concurrent-collections-for-cc>,
> it allows for defining the communication pattern via dependencies and the
> communication happens behind the scenes. I think the abstraction created by
> Parallel Index Sets has similarities.

To me it seems they are orthorgonal, but I just glanced at the
documentation. In our approach the user has full control and has to
think about parallelism, while Intel seems to derive everything from
data dependencies.

> 
> Is there a particular reason that the thread support that you want
> implemented has to be done using POSIX threads or C+11 thread features?.
> OpenMP might also be a reasonable alternative and if the workload is not
> easy to partition statically Thread Building
> Blocks<http://threadingbuildingblocks.org/> is
> a very good candidate.

I am intrigued to use available language features. OpenMP seems to be
quite orthorgonal to our approach. At least I do not see how to make
sure memory is local.

But as always, I can be wrong. Feel free to convince us of a different
approach in your proposal with good arguments and proof of concepts.

> Can you please let me know what steps I should take to make a strong
> application for the project?

http://www.dune-project.org/gsoc/getstarted.html
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/google/gsoc2013/dune > Application Template

Cheers,

Markus

-- 
Do you need more support with DUNE or HPC in general? 

Dr. Markus Blatt - HPC-Simulation-Software & Services http://www.dr-blatt.de
Hans-Bunte-Str. 8-10, 69123 Heidelberg, Germany
Tel.: +49 (0) 160 97590858  Fax: +49 (0)322 1108991658