Introducing EBSP; a bulk-synchronous parallel library

[jwbuurlage]

[xoru]

Where is a ruby wrapper?

[jwbuurlage]

Epiphany BSP is a C library which simplifies writing and porting parallel programs for the Epiphany. The performance penalty (and in particular the memory penalty) for using 'wrappers' on the Epiphany is generally too high so we have not attempted this, although some attempts have been made to port languages such as Python and Ruby to the Parallella (see e.g. ).

[polas]

Hi - I think your EBSP is really cool, I have had a bit of a play with it and your documentation all makes sense and it is pretty simple to get your examples up and running I am looking forward to you posting more complex codes on your blog. Whilst this seems very realistic to be used directly, do you also think that it might be useful as an intermediate technology? For instance could a higher level language/library (maybe following a PGAS approach) then use your work as the implementation technology rather than having to shunt messages between the Epiphany/ARM via shared memory (and worry about data timing/consistency) etc?

Cheers,
Nick

[jwbuurlage]

Hi Nick,

Thanks! Yes thats certainly one of the applications we have in mind. Personally I am working on a C++ library for numerical linear algebra which can be viewed as a parallel/accelerated version of which also runs on the Parallella. I will open-source this project in a couple of months. This uses Epiphany BSP to run operations if some cost function decides it is worthwhile to use the Epiphany chip. We have also experimented with writing a C++ library which supported PGAS-style arrays on top of Epiphany BSP, but this hasn't materialized (yet).

However, as you mentioned, EBSP works just as well when used stand-alone, which is really exciting

PS: I am impressed by your work on ePython, looking forward to looking at it in more detail soon.

[aolofsson]

Do you think you can place a small "hello world" example in the parallella_examples directory for EBSP?
It should include a build/run script and indications of any pre requisites.

https://github.com/parallella/parallella-examples

This is becoming the go to place for everyone getting ramped up with parallella. The goal is to introduce BSP and other models to as many people as possible.

[jwbuurlage]

A small update, we have summarized some important benchmarking results at , which should be relevant to all developers that use Epiphany BSP to program the Parallella.

[jwbuurlage]

We just to support ESDK version 2016.3.

[jwbuurlage]

We have just released the first stable version: . See the for more information. Please let us know if you have any questions, comments or issues!