Pipelining with Futures

Pipelining has been used in the design of many PRAM algorithms to reduce their asymptotic running time. Paul, Vishkin, and Wagener (PVW) used the approach in a parallel implementation of 2-3 trees. The approach was later used by Cole in the first O(lg n) time sorting algorithm on the PRAM not based on the AKS sorting network, and has since been used to improve the time of several other algorithms. Although the approach has improved the asymptotic time of many algorithms, there are two practical problems: maintaining the pipeline is quite complicated for the programmer, and the pipelining forces highly synchronous code execution. Synchronous execution is less practical on asynchronous machines and makes it difficult to modify a schedule to use less memory or to take better advantage of locality. In this paper we show how futures (a parallel language construct) can be used to implement pipelining without requiring the user to code it explicitly, allowing for much simpler code and more ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: SPAA
• Authors: Guy E. Blelloch, Margaret Reid-Miller
• Keywords: 2-3 Trees, Algorithms, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Pipelining, SPAA 1997