An API for Choreographing Data Accesses 

Dartmouth Technical Report PCS-TR95-267

	Elizabeth A. M. Shriver
	Leonard F. Wisniewski

Date: November 1995

URL (compressed postscript): <http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR95-267.ps.Z> (124KB)

URL (PDF): <http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR95-267.pdf> (284KB)

Abstract:
 Current APIs for multiprocessor multi-disk file systems are not easy
 to use in developing out-of-core algorithms that choreograph parallel
 data accesses.  Consequently, the efficiency of these algorithms is
 hard to achieve in practice.  We address this deficiency by specifying
 an API that includes data-access primitives for data choreography.
 With our API, the programmer can easily access specific blocks from
 each disk in a single operation, thereby fully utilizing the
 parallelism of the underlying storage system.
  Our API supports the development of libraries of commonly-used
 higher-level routines such as matrix-matrix addition, matrix-matrix
 multiplication, and BMMC (bit-matrix-multiply/complement)
 permutations.  We illustrate our API in implementations of these three
 high-level routines to demonstrate how easy it is to use.

Note:
 Also published as Courant Institute Tech Report 708.