OOSPMD

SPMD stands for Single Program Multiple Data, which is a technique used in paralellizing applications by separating task and running them simultaneously on different machines or processors. ProActive allows the use of object oriented programming combined with the SPMD techniques.

ProActive uses group communication with SPMD in order to free the programmer from having to implement the complex communication code required for setting identical groups in each SPMD activity. Group communication allows the focus to be on the application itself and not on the synchronizations. An SPMD group is a group of active objects where each one has a group referencing all the active objects.

This chapter presents the mechanism of typed group communication as an new alternative to the old SPMD programming model. While being placed in an object-oriented context, this mechanism helps the definition and the coordination of distributed activities. The approach offers a better structuring flexibility and implementation through a modest size API. The automation of key communication mechanisms and synchronization simplifies code writing.

The typed group communication system can be used to simulate MPI-style collective communication. Contrary to MPI that requires all members of a group to collectively call the same communication primitive, our group communication scheme makes possible for one activity to call methods on the group.

The main class for the SPMD groups is org.objectweb.proactive.api.PASPMD. This class contains methods for creating and controlling ProActive SPMD groups.

Figure 15.1. 

An SPMD group is a ProActive typed group built with the PASPMD.newSPMDGroup() method. This method looks like the PAGroup.newGroup() method; they have similar behavior (and overloads). The difference is that each member of an SPMD group has a reference to a group containing all the others members and itself (i.e. a reference to the SPMD group itself).

For a standard Java class:

public class A implements InitActive, RunActive, EndActive, java.io.Serializable {

   /**
    *
    */
   private String name = "anonymous";
   private boolean onewayCallReceived = false;

   public A() {
   }

The SPMD group is built as follows:

Object[][] params = { { "Agent0" }, { "Agent1" }, { "Agent2" } };
Node[] nodes = { NodeFactory.getDefaultNode(), super.getANode(), super.getANode() };
this.spmdgroup = (A) PASPMD.newSPMDGroup(A.class.getName(), params, nodes);

Object members of an SPMD group are aware about the whole group. They can obtain some informations about the SPMD group they belong to such as the size of the group, their rank in the group, and a reference to the group in order to get more informations or to communicate with method invocations. Those informations are respectively obtained using the following static methods of the PASPMD class.

public static int getMySPMDGroupSize()

public static int getMyRank()

and

public static Object getSPMDGroup()

Synchronizing processes is an important operation in any distributed system. Managing concurrency when several processes try to reach the same resource and coordinating the action of several processes to perform a joint computation are important parts of distributed computing

There are different techniques to synchronize processes. With a SPMD application, we have the synchronization barriers mechanism.

Traditional barriers as those provided for example by MPI have a blocking behavior. When a process meets such a barrier, it fully stops its execution immediately and informs all the other members of the SPMD group about its state. It is only when all the other members have reach this barrier too that all the processes will be able to continue their execution. As the barriers are often used to synchronize the communication between processes, it is inefficient to completely stop the execution of a process without distinction between local computation and communication.

As a solution to this inefficiency ProActive provides non-blocking barriers to only synchronize communication between activities. When an activity reaches a barrier instruction while executing a service, it will continue the execution of the current service until its end and tag all the next outgoing requests as post barrier. Consequently, any activity receiving a request tagged like this will delay its service until all the activities implied in this synchronization are ready to synchronize. An example of this behavior is illustrated on the Figure 15.2, “Behaviour example of a total barrier”.

This example presents the timelines of three active objects which are performing one type of barrier called a total barrier. The requests A and B are served before the synchronization as they were sent before the reach of the barrier instruction (symbolized by a red point). On the contrary, the requests X and Y are served after the synchronization, as they were sent after the barrier instruction.

Figure 15.2. Behaviour example of a total barrier

The OOSPMD programming model provided by ProActive offers three kinds of barriers to synchronize activities:

15.3.1. Total Barrier

Total barrier directly involves the SPMD group. A call to

public static void totalBarrier(String barrierName)

will block until all the members in the SPMD group have reached and called the identical barrier primitive. Such a call communicates with all the members of the SPMD group. The barrier is released when the Active Object has received a barrier message from all other members of the SPMD group (including itself).

	Warning
	The string parameter is used as a unique identity name for the barrier. It is the programmer responsibility to ensure that two (or more) different barriers with the same id name are not invoked simultaneously.

Let us take a Java class that contains a method calling a total barrier, here the method foo:

myspmdgroup.foo();
PASPMD.totalBarrier("'1'");
myspmdgroup.bar();
PASPMD.totalBarrier("'2'");
myspmdgroup.gee();

Note that usually, strings used as unique ID are more complex; they can be based on the full name of the class or the package (org.objectweb.proactive.ClassName), for example. The SPMD group is built as follow:

Object[][] params = { { "Agent0" }, { "Agent1" }, { "Agent2" } };
Node[] nodes = { NodeFactory.getDefaultNode(), super.getANode(), super.getANode() };
this.spmdgroup = (A) PASPMD.newSPMDGroup(A.class.getName(), params, nodes);

When the method start() is called on different instances of the class containing it, the different instances will wait for myspmdgroup.foo() to be completed and the barrier call to be made before they start myspmdgroup.bar(). The instances will also synchronize after the call to myspmdgroup.bar() as there is also a second barrier PASPMD.totalBarrier("'2'").

The programmer has to ensure that all the members of an SPMD group call the barrier method otherwise the members of the group may indefinitely wait.

org.objectweb.proactive.core.group.topology

// synchronization to be sure that all submatrix have exchanged borders
PASPMD.neighbourBarrier("SynchronizationWithNeighbors" + this.iterationsToStop, this.neighbors);

 PASPMD.methodBarrier({'foo', 'bar', 'gee'}); 

   PASPMD.methodBarrier({'foo'});
   PASPMD.methodBarrier({'bar'});
   PASPMD.methodBarrier({'gee'});