CoCa: A Parallelization Model for Real-Time Data Analysis in High-Energy Physics
Peter van der Stok
Appeared in: IEEE Concurrency, April-June, Vol. 7, Nr 2, pp 38-46, 1999.
ABSTRACT
The scale, complexity and performance requirements of future High Energy
Physics experiments make the parallelization of the software a necessity.
A programming model, Communication Capability (CoCa), is presented that
allows parallelization of the software at several levels of granularity.
HEP software needs to recombine related data and reject data on many
processors on the basis of the result of one single processor.
Consequently, the isolation and atomicity properties of database transactions
are attractive properties of our model. The complexity induced by the
characteristics of the parallelized software is for a large part removed
by the proposed model. The model has a higher level of abstraction
than message passing while performance is shown to be comparable with
PVM and MPI.