Global Arrays

Global Arrays (GA)
Paradigm	parallel, one-sided message passing, imperative (procedural), structured
First appeared	1994
Stable release	5.8.2/November 2022
Typing discipline	static, weak
OS	Cross-platform
Website	hpc.pnl.gov/globalarrays/

Global Arrays, or GA, is the library developed by scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for parallel computing. GA provides a friendly API for shared-memory programming on distributed-memory computers for multidimensional arrays. The GA library is a predecessor to the GAS (global address space) languages currently being developed for high-performance computing.^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4]

The GA toolkit has additional libraries including a Memory Allocator (MA), Aggregate Remote Memory Copy Interface (ARMCI), and functionality for out-of-core storage of arrays (ChemIO). Although GA was initially developed to run with TCGMSG, a message passing library that came before the MPI standard (Message Passing Interface), it is now fully compatible with MPI. GA includes simple matrix computations (matrix-matrix multiplication, LU solve) and works with ScaLAPACK. Sparse matrices are available but the implementation is not optimal yet.

GA was developed by Jarek Nieplocha, Robert Harrison, R. J. Littlefield, Manoj Krishnan, and Vinod Tipparaju. The ChemIO library for out-of-core storage was developed by Jarek Nieplocha, Robert Harrison and Ian Foster.

The GA library is incorporated into many quantum chemistry packages, including NWChem, MOLPRO, UTChem, MOLCAS, and TURBOMOLE. The GA library is also incorporated into sub-surface code STOMP Archived 2013-02-13 at the Wayback Machine^[5]

The GA toolkit is free software, licensed under a self-made license Archived 2019-04-05 at the Wayback Machine.

References

^ Nieplocha, Jarek; Harrison, Robert (1997). "Shared Memory Programming in Metacomputing Environments: The Global Array Approach". The Journal of Supercomputing. 11 (2): 119–136. doi:10.1023/A:1007955822788. S2CID 27322677.
^ Nieplocha, Jarek (2006). "Advances, Applications and Performance of the Global Arrays Shared Memory Programming Toolkit". International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications. 20 (2): 203–231. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.133.9926. doi:10.1177/1094342006064503. S2CID 116634.
^ Nieplocha, Jaroslaw; Harrison, Robert J.; Littlefield, Richard J. (1996). "Global arrays: A nonuniform memory access programming model for high-performance computers". The Journal of Supercomputing. 10 (2): 169–189. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.41.5891. doi:10.1007/BF00130708. S2CID 1272614.
^ Tipparaju, Vinod; Krishnan, Manoj; Palmer, Bruce; Petrini, Fabrizio; Nieplocha, Jarek (2008). "Towards Fault Resilient Global Arrays". In Bischof, Christian; Bücker, Martin; Gibbon, Paul; Joubert, Gerhard R.; Lippert, Thomas; Mohr, Bernd; Peters, Frans (eds.). Parallel Computing: Architectures, Algorithms and Applications. Advances in Parallel Computing. Vol. 15. Amsterdam: IOS Press. pp. 339–345. ISBN 978-1-58603-796-3. ISSN 0927-5452. OCLC 226966397. Archived from the original on 2021-03-06. Retrieved 2012-07-17.
^ "Gordon Bell Finalist at SC09 - GA Crosses the Petaflop Barrier". PNNL. 2009. Archived from the original on 2013-02-22. Retrieved 2015-05-23.