This is an old revision of the document!
Projects
Alternative Storage Layouts for Improved Vectorisation
Lead Developers: Artem Shinkarovs (2015)
The arrival of multi-core processors in the mainstream forebodes a general shift into distributed computing. An effective utilization of such systems requires the software to be used on such systems to consist of chunks of work that can be operated on independently and locally. For large data structures such as arrays a reorganisation of the way the data is stored in memory may have a vast effect on the localality of data and, thus, on the runtime efficiency that can be achieved.
This project investigates the effectiveness of alternative layouts by using the high-performance array language SaC. The intended approach is to re-write several SaC programs in a way that mimicks alternative layouts. Extensive performance comparisons will then give an indication of the effectiveness of the layouts investigated.
Current Status: finished.
Introducing Controlled Forms of Non-Determinism -- Side-Effects within With-Loops
Lead Developers: Theo van Klaveren (2006), Torben Gerhards (2007)
The central language for data parallelism in SaC, the With-Loop, is side-effect-free. Although this is essential when it comes to concurrent executions, in some situations, this restriction is rather inconvenient. Examples for such situations include:
dbug output within the body of a With-Loop pixel-wise output of computer generated images arrays of random numbers In all these cases, we are not interested in the exact order the output / side-effect happens. Instead, we want as much concurrency as possible. However, the non-determinism should be confined within With-Loop boundaries.
Current Status: finished.