PIES: Parallelization using Inspector/Executor Strategies
The PIES project started in Spring 2008. This research involves developing a tool suite called PIES (Parallelization using Inspector/Executor Strategies) for the automatic incorporation of inspector/executor strategies into irregular applications. Inspector/executor strategies have been developed to parallelize irregular computations such as solving partial differential equations over irregular grids, molecular dynamics simulations, and computations over sparse matrices. Although inspector/executor strategies have been incorporated into many applications and libraries, these strategies are still hindered by the lack of a general framework for automating the process of incorporating inspector/executor strategies into programs. Use of the PIES tool suite will reduce software development time by automating the incorporation of inspector/executor strategies into existing code and enables the development of new inspector/executor strategies.
This project also includes an outreach program for local high school students based on applying the PIES tool suite to the molecular dynamics simulations that are part of the Molecular Workbench. The Molecular Workbench enables educators to easily develop educational modules to demonstrate physical concepts visually for students, but it is currently limited to simulating 1000 particles or less. As part of the PIES project, we will (1) apply the PIES tool to the Molecular Workbench simulation engine to enable larger simulations on multi-core processors, which are becoming standard on many desktops and laptops, and (2) develop an educational module with the Molecular Workbench software that interactively introduces students to parallelization concepts within the context of a multi-core parallelization of a molecular dynamics model relevant to their current chemistry curriculum. By presenting an opportunity to do computer science experiments in the context of parallelizing computational models, the students will be exposed to some of the exciting ways computer science is applicable to the natural sciences in general.
Molecular Workbench Worksheets
Our group has started to put together some great worksheets for use in high school classrooms. To view the worksheets, first download the Molecular Workbench software. Next, click on one of the links below and the Molecular Workbench application should be launched to display the selected worksheet.- Evaporation by Tim Lenczycki
- Pizza and PIES August 2008 presentation, This presentation was put together by the whole group. Download it, unpack it into a directory by typing "tar xzf piesPresentation-Aug2008.tgz", and then open overview.cml from within the Molecular Workbench application.