A Marshalled Data Format for Pointers in Relocatable Data Blocks

Abstract

As future computing hardware progresses towards extreme-scale technology, new challenges arise for addressing heterogeneous compute and memory resources, for providing application resilience in the presence of more frequent failures, and for working within strict energy constraints. While C++ has gained popularity in recent years within the HPC community, some concepts of object-oriented program design may be at odds with the techniques we use to address the challenges of extreme-scale computing. In this work, we focus on the challenges related to using aggregate data structures that include pointer values within a programming model where the runtime may frequently relocate data, and traditional serialization techniques are not practical. We propose and evaluate a marshalled encoding for relocatable data blocks, and present a C++ library and other tools to simplify the work of the application programmer developing new applications or porting existing applications to such emerging programming models.