Design and Implementation of the PULSAR Programming System for Large Scale Computing

The objective of the PULSAR project was to design a programming model suitable for large scale machines with complex memory hierarchies, and to deliver a prototype implementation of a runtime system supporting that model. PULSAR tackled the challenge by proposing a programming model based on systolic processing and virtualization. The PULSAR programming model is quite simple, with point-to-point channels as the main communication abstraction. The runtime implementation is very lightweight and fully distributed, and provides multithreading, message-passing and multi-GPU offload capabilities. Performance evaluation shows good scalability up to one thousand nodes with one thousand GPU accelerators.