Structured Parallel Programming

Chapter 6

Data Reorganization

This chapter will discuss patterns for data organization and reorganization. The performance bottleneck in many applications is just as likely, if not more likely, to be due to data movement as it is to be computation. For data-intensive applications, it is often a good idea to design the data movement first and the computation around the chosen data movements. Some common applications are in fact mostly data reorganization: searching and sorting, for instance.

In a parallel computer, additional considerations arise. First, there may be additional costs for moving data between processors and for reorganizing data for vectorization. Changes to data layout for vectorization may affect how data structures are declared ...