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ViennaX: a parallel plugin execution framework for scientific computing

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Abstract

We present the free open source plugin execution framework ViennaX for modularizing and parallelizing scientific simulations. In general, functionality is abstracted by the notion of a task, which is implemented as a plugin. The plugin system facilitates the utilization of both, already available functionality as well as new implementations. Each task can define arbitrary data dependencies which are used by ViennaX to build a task graph. The framework supports the execution of this dependence graph based on the message passing interface in either a serial or a parallel fashion. The applied modular approach allows for defining highly flexible simulations, as plugins can be easily exchanged. The framework’s general design as well as implementation details are discussed. Applications based on the Mandelbrot set and the solution of a partial differential equation are investigated, and performance results are shown.

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Notes

  1. http://www.csc.fi/english/pages/elmer/.

  2. http://viennax.sourceforge.net/.

  3. http://www.boost.org/.

  4. http://threadingbuildingblocks.org/.

  5. http://www.cca-forum.org/.

  6. http://cactuscode.org/.

  7. http://www.earthsystemmodeling.org/.

  8. http://coolfluidsrv.vki.ac.be/trac/coolfluid/.

  9. http://www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/.

  10. http://www.p4est.org/.

  11. http://www.uintah.utah.edu/.

  12. http://icl.cs.utk.edu/dague/.

  13. http://www.overtureframework.org/.

  14. http://calvados.di.unipi.it/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=ffnamespace:about.

  15. http://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-cilk-plus.

  16. http://fenicsproject.org/.

  17. http://www.openfoam.org/.

  18. http://www.boost.org/libs/mpi/.

  19. http://www.mpich.org/.

  20. http://viennacl.sourceforge.net/.

  21. http://pugixml.org/.

  22. http://www.lua.org/.

  23. http://www.boost.org/libs/graph/.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been supported by the European Research Council (ERC) through the grant #247056 MOSILSPIN. Additionally, this work has been partially supported by the HPC-EUROPA2 project (project number: 228398) with the support of the European Commission—Capacities Area—Research Infrastructures. This work made use of the facilities of HECToR, the UK’s national high-performance computing service, which is provided by UoE HPCx Ltd at the University of Edinburgh, Cray Inc and NAG Ltd, and funded by the Office of Science and Technology through EPSRC’s High End Computing Programme.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Microelectronics, Technische Universität Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Josef Weinbub & Siegfried Selberherr

  2. Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL, USA

    Karl Rupp

Authors
  1. Josef Weinbub
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  2. Karl Rupp
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  3. Siegfried Selberherr
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Correspondence to Josef Weinbub.

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Weinbub, J., Rupp, K. & Selberherr, S. ViennaX: a parallel plugin execution framework for scientific computing. Engineering with Computers 30, 651–668 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00366-013-0314-1

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