Efficient run-time support for irregular block-structured applications

Parallel implementations of scientific applications often rely on elaborate dynamic data structures with complicated communication patterns. We describe a set of intuitive geometric programming abstractions that simplify coordination of irregular block-structured scientific calculations without sacrificing performance. We have implemented these abstractions in KeLP, a C++ run-time library. KeLP's abstractions enable the programmer to express complicated communication patterns for dynamic applications and to tune communication activity with a high-level, abstract interface. We show that KeLP's flexible communication model effectively manages elaborate data motion patterns arising in structured adaptive mesh refinement and achieves performance comparable to hand-coded message-passing on several structured numerical kernels. (C) 1998 Academic Press.