BIB-VERSION:: CS-TR-v2.0
ID:: ncstrl.dartmouthcs//TR95-267
ENTRY:: January 09, 1996
ORGANIZATION:: Dartmouth College, Computer Science
TITLE:: An API for Choreographing Data Accesses 
TYPE:: Technical Report (paper)
REVISION:: 1
AUTHOR:: Shriver, Elizabeth A. M.
AUTHOR:: Wisniewski, Leonard F.  
DATE:: November 1995 
RETRIEVAL:: For a paper copy, email <reports@cs.dartmouth.edu>
RETRIEVAL:: For a paper copy, write to
       Technical Report Librarian
       Department of Computer Science
       Dartmouth College
       6211 Sudikoff Laboratory
       Hanover, NH 03755-3510
       USA
RETRIEVAL:: Compressed Postscript at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR95-267.ps.Z
RETRIEVAL:: PDF at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR95-267.pdf
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.
END:: ncstrl.dartmouthcs//TR95-267