Section: New Results

AutoParallel: Automatic parallelization and distributed execution of affine loop nests in Python

Participant : Philippe Clauss.

The last improvements in programming languages and models have focused on simplicity and abstraction; leading Python to the top of the list of the programming languages. However, there is still room for improvement when preventing users from dealing directly with distributed and parallel computing issues. We propose AutoParallel, a Python module to automatically find an appropriate task-based parallelisation of affine loop nests to execute them in parallel in a distributed computing infrastructure. This parallelization can also include the building of data blocks to increase tasks' granularity in order to achieve a good execution performance. Moreover, AutoParallel is based on sequential programming and only contains a small annotation in the form of a Python decorator so that anyone with intermediate-level programming skills can scale up an application to hundreds of cores.

This work has been accomplished in collaboration with Cristian Ramon-Cortes, Ramon Amela, Jorge Ejarque and Rosa M. Badia of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Spain. A journal paper is in preparation.