Title : A Reconfigurable Component Model for HPC
Speaker: Vincent Lanore
Abstract: High-performance applications whose structure changes dynamically during execution are extremely complex to develop, maintain and adapt to new hardware. Such applications would greatly benefit from easy reuse and separation of concerns which are typical advantages of component models. Unfortunately, no existing component model is both HPC-ready (in terms of scalability and overhead) and able to easily handle dynamic reconfiguration. We aim at addressing performance, scalability and programmability by separating locking and synchronization concerns from reconfiguration code. To this end, we propose directMOD, a component model which provides on one hand a flexible mechanism to lock subassemblies with a very small overhead and high scalability, and on the other hand a set of well-defined mechanisms to easily plug various independently-written reconfiguration components to lockable subassemblies. We evaluate both the model itself and a C++/MPI implementation called directL2C.