Task pool teams for implementing irregular algorithms on clusters of SMPs

The characteristics of irregular algorithms make a parallel implementation difficult, especially for PC clusters or clusters of SMPs. These characteristics may include an unpredictable access behavior to dynamically changing data structures or strong irregular coupling of computations. Problems are an unknown load distribution and expensive irregular communication patterns for data accesses and redistributions. We propose task pool teams for implementing irregular algorithms on clusters of PCs or SMPs. A task pool team combines multithreaded programming using task pools on single nodes with explicit message passing between different nodes. As an application example, we use the hierarchical radiosity algorithm.