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In the age of the Internet of Things and social media platforms, huge amounts of digital data are generated by and collected from many sources, including sensors, mobile devices, wearable trackers and security cameras. This data, commonly referred to as Big Data, is challenging current storage, processing, and analysis capabilities. New models, languages, systems and algorithms continue to be developed to effectively collect, store, analyze and learn from Big Data. Most of the recent surveys provide a global analysis of the tools that are used in the main phases of Big Data management (generation, acquisition, storage, querying and visualization of data). Differently, this work analyzes and reviews parallel and distributed paradigms, languages and systems used today to analyze and learn from Big Data on scalable computers. In particular, we provide an in-depth analysis of the properties of the main parallel programming paradigms (MapReduce, workflow, BSP, message passing, and SQL-like) and, through programming examples, we describe the most used systems for Big Data analysis (e.g., Hadoop, Spark, and Storm). Furthermore, we discuss and compare the different systems by highlighting the main features of each of them, their diffusion (community of developers and users) and the main advantages and disadvantages of using them to implement Big Data analysis applications. The final goal of this work is to help designers and developers in identifying and selecting the best/appropriate programming solution based on their skills, hardware availability, application domains and purposes, and also considering the support provided by the developer community.

Heterogeneous many-cores are now an integral part of modern computing systems ranging from embedding systems to supercomputers. While heterogeneous many-core design offers the potential for energy-efficient high-performance, such potential can only be unlocked if the application programs are suitably parallel and can be made to match the underlying heterogeneous platform. In this article, we provide a comprehensive survey for parallel programming models for heterogeneous many-core architectures and review the compiling techniques of improving programmability and portability. We examine various software optimization techniques for minimizing the communicating overhead between heterogeneous computing devices. We provide a road map for a wide variety of different research areas. We conclude with a discussion on open issues in the area and potential research directions. This article provides both an accessible introduction to the fast-moving area of heterogeneous programming and a detailed bibliography of its main achievements.

Processors with multiple sockets or chiplets are becoming more conventional. These kinds of processors usually expose a single shared address space. However, due to hardware restrictions, they adopt a NUMA approach, where each processor accesses local memory faster than remote memories. Reducing data motion is crucial to improve the overall performance. Thus, computations must run as close as possible to where the data resides. We propose a new approach that mitigates the NUMA effect on NUMA systems. Our solution is based on the OmpSs-2 programming model, a task-based parallel programming model, similar to OpenMP. We first provide a simple API to allocate memory in NUMA systems using different policies. Then, combining user-given information that specifies dependences between tasks, and information collected in a global directory when allocating data, we extend our runtime library to perform NUMA-aware work scheduling. Our heuristic considers data location, distance between NUMA nodes, and the load of each NUMA node to seamlessly minimize data motion costs and load imbalance. Our evaluation shows that our NUMA support can significantly mitigate the NUMA effect by reducing the amount of remote accesses, and so improving performance on most benchmarks, reaching up to 2x speedup in a 2-NUMA machine, and up to 7.1x in a 8-NUMA machine.

The genesis of parallel programming models is considered. It is shown that parallelism and hardware support of synchronization inherent in an architecture determine a parallel programming model. Modern VLSI technology require shift to programming models based on shared memory.

This paper presents a framework to easily build and execute parallel applications in container-based distributed computing platforms in a user-transparent way. The proposed framework is a combination of the COMP Superscalar (COMPSs) programming model and runtime, which provides a straightforward way to develop task-based parallel applications from sequential codes, and containers management platforms that ease the deployment of applications in computing environments (as Docker, Mesos or Singularity). This framework provides scientists and developers with an easy way to implement parallel distributed applications and deploy them in a one-click fashion. We have built a prototype which integrates COMPSs with different containers engines in different scenarios: i) a Docker cluster, ii) a Mesos cluster, and iii) Singularity in an HPC cluster. We have evaluated the overhead in the building phase, deployment and execution of two benchmark applications compared to a Cloud testbed based on KVM and OpenStack and to the usage of bare metal nodes. We have observed an important gain in comparison to cloud environments during the building and deployment phases. This enables better adaptation of resources with respect to the computational load. In contrast, we detected an extra overhead during the execution, which is mainly due to the multi-host Docker networking.

Dataflow programming consists in developing a program by describing its sequential stages and the interactions between them. The runtime systems supporting this kind of programming are responsible for exploiting the parallelism by concurrently executing the different stages as soon as their dependencies are met. In this paper we introduce a new parallel programming model and framework based on the dataflow paradigm. It presents a new combination of features that allows to easily map programs to shared or distributed memory, exploiting data locality and affinity to obtain the same performance than optimized coarse-grain MPI programs. These features include: It is a unique one-tier model that supports hybrid shared- and distributed-memory systems with the same abstractions; it can express activities arbitrarily linked, including non-nested cycles; it uses internally a distributed work-stealing mechanism to allow Multiple-Producer/Multiple-Consumer configurations; and it has a runtime mechanism for the reconfiguration of the dependences and communication channels which also allows the creation of task-to-task data affinities. We present an evaluation using examples of different classes of applications. Experimental results show that programs generated using this framework deliver good performance in hybrid distributed- and shared-memory environments, with a similar development effort as other dataflow programming models oriented to shared-memory.

The advent of the Cloud and the popularization of mobile devices have led us to a shift in computing access where users have an interactive display, and heavy computations run remotely, in the Cloud servers. COMPSs-Mobile is a framework that aims to ease the development of energy-efficient and high-performing applications for this kind of environment. The framework provides an infrastructure-unaware programming model that allows developers to code regular Android applications whose computation is transparently parallelized and partially offloaded to remote resources. This paper gives an overview of the programming model and describes the internal components of the toolkit which supports it focusing on the offloading and checkpointing mechanisms. It also presents the results of some tests conducted to evaluate the behavior of the solution and to measure the potential benefits in Android applications.

The paper mentions that the Intel Threading Building Blocks is a key component of Intel Parallel Building Blocks. This widely used C++ template library helps developers achieve well-performing modular parallel programs in multiprogrammed environments.

Today’s mobile processors generally have multiple cores and sufficient hardware resources to support AI-enabled software operation. However, very few AI applications make full use of the computing performance of mobile multiprocessors. This is because the typical software development is sequential, and the degree of parallelism of the program is very low. In the increasingly complex AI-driven and software development projects with natural human–computer interaction, this will undoubtedly cause a waste of mobile computing resources that are originally limited. This paper proposes an intelligent system software framework, CellS, to improve smart software development on multicore mobile processor systems. This software framework mimics the cell system. In this framework, each cell can autonomously aware changes in the environment (input) and reaction (output) and may change the behavior of other cells. Smart software can be regarded as a large number of cells interacting with each other. Software developed based on the CellS framework has a high degree of scalability and flexibility and can more fully use multicore computing resources to achieve higher computing efficiency.