APT Wiki | Jamaica / BulkSynchronousParallelism

What is BSP?

A BSP program is a sequential composition of global "supersteps". Each superstep is divided into three phases:

thread-local computation, using only values stored in local memory
communication between threads, transferring data values
barrier synchronization, waits for all communications to complete then makes newly communicated data available to threads' local memory

Here is a diagram to illustrate the superstep concept.

This picture is taken from "Questions and Answers about BSP" - an introductory article. This article (together with other useful BSP information) is available at

http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/work/bill.mccoll/oparl.html#intro

BSP and its relation to TCC

IanW says that TCC is a reincarnation of BSP. The parallels (no pun intended!) are clear. BSP local computations map onto TCC transactions. BSP global communications and barrier synchronizations map onto TCC transaction commits.