Practical Distributed Programming in C++

Abstract

The need for coupling high performance with productivity is steering the recent evolution of the C++ language where low-level aspects of parallel and distributed computing are now part of the standard or under discussion for inclusion. The Standard Template Library (STL) includes containers and algorithms as primary notions, coupled with execution policies that allow exploiting parallel platforms (e.g., multi-cores) on top of a well-defined operational semantics. In this work, we discuss the design of a stack for STL-compliant containers, iterators, algorithms, and execution policies targeting distributed-memory systems. Finally, we evaluate the proposed approach by analyzing the performance of our proof-of-concept implementation over a set of STL algorithms.