Experiences with Co-array Fortran on Hardware Shared Memory Platforms

Abstract

When performing source-to-source compilation of Co-array Fortran (CAF) programs into SPMD Fortran 90 codes for shared-memory multiprocessors, there are several ways of representing and manipulating data at the Fortran 90 language level. We describe a set of implementation alternatives and evaluate their performance implications for CAF variants of the STREAM, Random Access, Spark98 and NAS MG & SP benchmarks. We compare the performance of library-based implementations of one-sided communication with fine-grain communication that accesses remote data using load and store operations. Our experiments show that using application-level loads and stores for fine-grain communication can improve performance by as much as a factor of 24; however, codes requiring only coarse-grain communication can achieve better performance by using an architecture’s tuned memcpy for bulk data movement.

This work was supported in part by the Department of Energy under Grant DE-FC03-01ER25504/A000, the Los Alamos Computer Science Institute (LACSI) through LANL contract number 03891-99-23 as part of the prime contract (W-7405-ENG-36) between the DOE and the Regents of the University of California, Texas Advanced Technology Program under Grant 003604-0059-2001, and Compaq Computer Corporation under a cooperative research agreement. This research was performed in part using the Molecular Science Computing Facility (MSCF) in the William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a national scientific user facility sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research and located at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Pacific Northwest is operated for the Department of Energy by Battelle.