Non-Strict Execution in Parallel and Distributed Computing

This paper surveys and demonstrates the power of non-strict evaluation in applications executed on distributed architectures. We present the design, implementation, and experimental evaluation of single assignment, incomplete data structures in a distributed memory architecture and Abstract Network Machine (ANM). Incremental Structures (IS), Incremental Structure Software Cache (ISSC), and Dynamic Incremental Structures (DIS) provide non-strict data access and fully asynchronous operations that make them highly suited for the exploitation of fine-grain parallelism in distributed memory systems. We focus on split-phase memory operations and non-strict information processing under a distributed address space to improve the overall system performance. A novel technique of optimization at the communication level is proposed and described. We use partial evaluation of local and remote memory accesses not only to remove much of the excess overhead of message passing, but also to reduce the number of messages when some information about the input or part of the input is known. We show that split-phase transactions of IS, together with the ability of deferring reads, allow partial evaluation of distributed programs without losing determinacy. Our experimental evaluation indicates that commodity PC clusters with both IS and a caching mechanism, ISSC, are more robust. The system can deliver speedup for both regular and irregular applications. We also show that partial evaluation of memory accesses decreases the traffic in the interconnection network and improves the performance of MPI IS and MPI ISSC applications.