Research in the Field of Computational Technologies

The Department of Parallel Computational Technologies was formed in 1996 on the basis of Supercomputer Software Department (SSD) of the Institute of Computational Mathematics and Mathematical Geophysics in Academgorodok. The main research directions of the SSD are:

– investigations in the technologies of parallel computing and parallel programs construction for MIMD multicomputers (Laboratory for Parallel Program Synthesis under the direction of Prof. Malyshkin);

– investigations of different formal models of parallel processes, simulation of parallel algorithms and structures and elaboration of methods for high performance parallel architecture synthesis (Laboratory of Parallel Algorithms and Architectures, head of the Laboratory Dr. Piskunov);

– developing fundamental concepts, formal methods and computer tools for designing algorithmic-oriented architecture for data array processing (research group for fine-grained parallelism and cellular architecture, head of the group Dr. Bandman).

At present I am a master student of the Department of Parallel Computational Technologies. I am doing my thesis research in the area of parallel program synthesis.

The history of the subject area dates back to the middle of the
20^th century. The first computers taking advantage of parallelism were manufactured in United States in the late 1950-s. Since the early
1960-s, different parallel programming concepts had been developed abroad as well as in our country.

It is clear now that the computer clock frequency is reaching its limit, and it is parallel computations that define the future of high-performance computing. Up to now, a large amount of sequential programs and algorithms have been developed. Now it is for us to make them work on parallel systems taking advantages of parallel execution.

The academic research project Assembly System (ASSY) is carried out by the SSD research staff. The main goal of ASSY project is development of parallel computing technologies and support of Parallel Assembly Programming System which is characteristic of different large block multicomputer systems. The project is supervised by Prof. Malyshkin.

In short, the idea of the ASSY technology is as follows:

· atomic fragments of computations are programmed in conventional procedural language;

· a parallel computation is typically assembled of atomic fragments that can be executed concurrently on different nodes of the parallel system.

The title of my master's thesis is "Language and Compiler for Describing Computational Models". I have to create a programming system for the automated construction of parallel programs, formed by sequential atomic procedures. A language for description of the relationships between atomic procedures should be developed. The description is based on the notion of a computation model, which is treated as a network, the nodes of which correspond to certain functional modules, while the edges characterize interconnections between these modules reflecting possible ways of organization of the computations. This approach was suggested by A.Kh. Tyugu in the 1970-s.