NPAC Technical Report SCCS-453
An Integrated Software Development Model for Heterogeneous High Performance Computing
M Parashar, S Hariri, T Haupt, G Fox
Submitted January 21 1993
Abstract
The last few decades have seen an impressive developments in every
aspect of parallel computing technology; viz. processing and storage
technology, interconnect technology and software technology. Although
these systems incorporate large amount of computing power, they are
not general enough to efficiently support today's
computation-intensive problems (e.g., the Grand Challenges), that
warrant multiple computational models and levels of parallelism. We
believe that the future of parallel computing lies in the integration
of the plethora of "specialized" architectures into a single
Heterogeneous High Performance Computing (HHPC) environment that
allows them to cooperate in solving complex problems. Software
development in any Parallel/Distributed environment is a non-trivial
process and requires a thorough understanding of the application and
the architecture. This problem further intensifies as systems evolve
into HHPC environment. The objective of this paper is to formalize the
software development process for an HHPC environment. The issues and
requirements that need to be addressed in HHPC software development are
investigated and a model that meets these requirements is
proposed. Support required at each stage of the model is also
highlighted. The modelling of a stock option pricing is used as a
running example to validate the applicability of the model. Finally a
survey of existing tools and techniques applicable to the different
stages is presented.