Enabling collective communications between components
Résumé
Existing high performance component models mainly focus on the efficiency of the composition of two components, tackling also the special case of parallel components that enable N x M communications. The implementation of parallel components is usually assumed to be done thanks to some external communication paradigms like MPI. However, as of today, collective communication operations like broadcast, reduction, gather, etc. are not supported by component models. Programmers should develop such operations on top of point-to-point communication operations provided by component models. This paper studies how collective operations between components can be provided from an user and developer point of view. The result is an abstract component model that allows the implementation of collective communications. Software components are then able to use collective communications between several instances. To be effective on hierarchical resources such as grids, the model is hierarchical and relies on the concept of replicating component implementation. Last, the paper deals with the projection of such an abstract model onto existing models. It is validated through some very preliminary experiments.