David Bader is Executive Director of High-Performance Computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology and author of Petascale Computing: Algorithms and Applications.
In an interview by Jonathan Erickson (Dr. Dobb’s Journal), Dr. Bader says, “Continued performance on multicore and manycore processors now requires the exploitation of concurrency at the algorithmic level. SWARM is a freely available as open-source software package from my group at Georgia Tech for “SoftWare and Algorithms for Running on Multicore and Manycore processors”. SWARM brings together 15 years of research on shared-memory algorithms, and addresses the key issues in algorithm design for multicore processors. And we are grateful for the generous support from the National Science Foundation, IBM, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and Intel, that has enabled our research and development in parallel algorithms. SWARM, with continued development since 1994, is a portable open-source parallel library of basic primitives that fully exploit multicore and manycore processors. Using this framework, we have implemented efficient parallel algorithms for important, new primitive operations such as prefix-sums, pointer-jumping, symmetry breaking, and list ranking; for combinatorial problems such as sorting and selection; for parallel graph theoretic algorithms such as spanning tree, minimum spanning tree, graph decomposition, and tree contraction; and for computational genomics applications such as maximum parsimony.”
