Section: Other Grants and Activities

PHC Sakura MAE Grant

Participants : Alexandre Denis, Guillaume Mercier, Raymond Namyst, François Trahay.

During his stay at University of Tokyo (Japan) in 2008, Raymond Namyst has worked with Prof. Yutaka Ishikawa on the design of a multicore-enabled framework for communication and I/O in next generation clusters.

By comparing our respective approaches, we have realized that most of our optimization techniques are very similar in the sense that requests are gathered and arranged based on some application-specific optimization policy. The challenge is now to design a unified multicore-enabled framework to integrate and optimize both communication and remote file IO. Such a framework will form a great research vehicle to develop new optimization policies for the future multicore technologies. This research proposal has two main goals: providing a unified framework for dealing with IO and communication together with a common database of optimization strategies, and addressing a large spectrum of programming paradigms, such as multithreading, pure message-passing or hybrid programming.

Our proposal for a collaboration between our group and the group of Prof. Yutaka Ishikawa was accepted and has started at the beginning of 2009. Thanks to this program, several visits from both sides have been scheduled throughout this year. A preliminary integration of the Yampii 3 MPI implementation over NewMadeleine was developed. Some work regarding the integration of NewMadeleine and PIOMan in PGAS has also started during this year and we expect promising results.