SBIR Phase II: Technology for Integrated Computation and Communication

This Small Business Innovation Research Program Phase II research project proposes to develop a prototype product for an innovative parallel program development and execution technology, which can run parallel programs asynchronously in multiprocessors and supercomputers up to 100 times faster than what is currently possible, without using Message Passing Interfaces (MPI). For more than thirty years it had been assumed that the only way to efficiently compile and execute parallel programs was through MPI. Even though it had been recognized that parallel programs would run faster if executed asynchronously on the basis of data availability, technology needed to do that efficiently was not available, until Technology for Integrated Computation and Communication (TICC) came along. This tuning technology eliminates the need for dynamic checking of temporal coordination, and makes it possible to execute control signal exchange protocols in parallel with computations. More than 40 million messages may be exchanged per second. This eliminates communication bottleneck and allows asynchronous execution of parallel programs based on data availability without using MPI. TICC defines the semantics of causal statements and provides a very efficient implementation for them. TICC brings the following additional facilities: (1) Component based parallel program development environment, (2) Dynamic debugging of parallel programs (3) Dynamic monitoring and changing of messages and message traffic, (4) Dynamic repair and failure recovery, (5) Dynamic reconfiguration, and (5) Dynamic evolution parallel software systems. These have the consequent benefit of reducing parallel program development and maintenance costs, making them more easily and widely available. This, together with decreasing costs of multiprocessors, has the potential to usher in a new era of desktop supercomputing by 2007, with profound impact on science, technology, industry, education, theories of computation and communication, and society in general.