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EPSRC Reference: GR/K40321/01
Title: PORTABLE SOFTWARE TOOLS FOR THE PARALLELISATION OF COMPUTATIONAL MECHANICS (CM) SOFTWARE
Principal Investigator: Cross, Professor M
Other Investigators:
Ierotheou, Dr C Walshaw, Dr C
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Fegs Ltd Pre Nexus Migration Transtech Ltd
Department: Sch of Computing and Maths Sci
Organisation: University of Greenwich
Scheme: Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts: 01 January 1995 Ends: 31 December 1997 Value (£): 242,633
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Parallel Computing
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
Creative Industries Information Technologies
Related Grants:
Panel History:  
Summary on Grant Application Form
A substantial research programme has been underway at Greenwich for some years on the development of techniques and tools to facilitate the parallelisation of computational mechanics (CM) software. Much of the work on dependence analysis and parallel code generation techniques has been embedded into a suite of prototype tools, CAPTools, the initial version of which, has been targeted at semi-automatic parallelisation of structure mesh CM codes written in FORTRAN77. A powerful feature of CAPTools is the accuracy of the dependence analysis (based on novel symbolic array techniques) and interaction with the user whereby the system elicits information about program variables that cannot be inferred from the code. High quality parallel implementations of structured mesh CFD, CEM and heat transfer codes can be generated quickly with CAPTools. Additional research is required to extend the dependence analysis and code generation techniques to cope with recursion, pointers, etc so that the parallelisation tools may be extended to HPF, FORTRAN90 and C. It is also desirable to extend the optimisation procedures to include uni-modular matrix transformations and asynchronous communications. Research on extending the dependence analysis, parallel code generation and optimisation will form one focus of this programme. The Greenwich group have also been developing strategies for the parallelisation of unstructured mesh (UM) CM codes. A novel procedure, named JOSTLE, has been developed which is fast, partitions the problem specific mesh onto an arbitrary number of processors and ensures nearest neighbour communication on any kind of processor topology. The objective of the other phase of the research programme is to produce a parallel mesh decomposition tool from the JOSTLE procedure and embed it into CAPTools, so that unstructured mesh CM codes, when parallelised, have a mesh decomposition too embedded within them. Hence, the final objective of this research programme is to provide the techniques which enable the extension of the CAPTools toolkit to the parallelisation of all mesh based CM codes in any FORTRAN or C dialect.
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Organisation Website: http://www.gre.ac.uk