Summary

What is Bale?

Bale provides a library-based distributed programming model with a special focus on optimizing fine-grained communications.

hclib-actor mainly depends on the following libraries from Bale:

• libgetput: a library that enables one-sided communications, remote atomics, and collectives built on top of UPC/OpenSHMEM
• spmat: a library that facilitates the construction/manipulation of distributed sparse matrices, which is built on top of libgetput
• conveyors: a communication aggregation library, built on top of libgetput
• exstack/exstack2: a preliminary experimental version of conveyors.

For more details, please see the github repo for Bale can be found here.

How Bale is used in hclib-actor?

The key motivation for introducing hclib-actor is to simplify programming with conveyors while keeping the same performance. Specifically, note that conveyors requires ninja-level distributed programming skills as illustrated in this Histogram with conveyors example and providing a higher-level programming model would benefit non-ninja programmers such as domain experts and scientists.

hclib-actor is mainly designed to provide an actor based distributed programming model and completely abstracts away conveyors. Additionally, many of kernels and benchmarks in hclib-actor use routines from spmat and libgetput libraries.

For more details, please see the followings:

• spmat
• libgetput

Note

It is worth noting that hclib-actor does not necessarily depend on spmat or libgetput libraries. For example, for PGAS SPMD execution, bare OpenSHMEM and UPC can be used instead of libgetput.

Further Readings

• Jason DeVinney and John Gilbert. 2022. Bale: Kernels for irregular parallel computation (Not a benchmark) https://github.com/jdevinney/bale/blob/master/docs/Bale-StGirons-Final.pdf
• F. Miller Maley and Jason G. DeVinney. 2019. Conveyors for Many-to-Many Streaming Communication https://github.com/jdevinney/bale/blob/master/docs/uconvey.pdf