University of Houston

As high-end computing systems become larger and more powerful, application developers will require languages, libraries and tools that will allow them to program such systems and take advantage of the resources available. To make the architecture independent from the applications and vice-versa a conceptual model, called the programming model, is provided which is an abstraction over the hardware and the memory architectur. Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) is one such programming model that allows the executing processes to exploit locality of reference by keeping a part of the global data closer to the process. The application programmers benefit from using the PGAS model because it allows easy access to the global data and they do not need to meticulously micromanage the communication between processes. Many languages and libraries follow the PGAS model. The SHMEM programming library follows the PGAS programming model, and is available for C, C++, and Fortran programs which follow the SPMD style of programming. My work involves improving performance of the portable OpenSHMEM library through better collectives and enriching the library API by adding more meaningful calls that will improve productivity of the application programmer.