DatTeL: A DATA-PARALLEL C++ TEMPLATE LIBRARY

Abstract

The concept of C++ templates, realized in the Standard Template Library (STL), allows development of generic programs suitable for various concrete data structures. Our aim in this paper is to provide an opportunity for efficient execution of STL programs on parallel machines. We present DatTeL – a data-parallel library, which allows simple, efficient programming for various parallel architectures while staying within the paradigm of classical C++ template programming. We describe the principles of our approach and explain our design decisions and their implementation in the library. The presentation is illustrated with a case study — parallelization of a generic algorithm for carry-lookahead addition. We compare DatTeL to related work and report experimental results for the current version of our library.