Adhara: runtime support for dynamic space-based applications on distributed memory MIMD multiprocessors

We describe Adhara, a runtime system specialized for dynamic space-based applications, such as particle-in-cell simulations, molecular dynamics problems and adaptive grid simulations. Adhara facilitates the programming of such applications by supporting spatial data structures (e.g., grids and particles), and facilitates obtaining good performance by performing automatic data partitioning and dynamic load balancing. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Adhera by efficiently parallelizing a specific plasma physics application. The development of the parallel program involved the addition of very few lines of code beyond those required to develop a sequential version of the application, and executed at 90% efficiency on 16 nodes of an Intel Paragon