BSP Worldwide is an association of people interested in the development of the Bulk Synchronous Parallel (BSP) computing model for parallel programming. It exists to provide a convenient means for the exchange of ideas and experiences about BSP and to stimulate the use of the BSP model. Areas of interest of BSP Worldwide include:

• Research into properties of the model
• Application of the model to programming tasks of all kinds including the scheduling of parallel execution
• Performance benchmarking and comparison with other approaches
• Cost modelling and performance prediction
• Definition of standard functions for programming in the BSP style
• Implementation of programming tools to support the use of the model

The organisation does not have a formal structure. Its activities depend on contributions by volunteers, BSP users, and developers.

News

• March 9, 2011. Leslie Valiant, founder of BSP, wins the 2010 ACM Turing award.
• March 8, 2011. MulticoreBSP released. An object-oriented version of BSPlib in Java aimed at multicore architectures, developed by Albert-Jan Yzelman and Rob Bisseling.

Current BSP Work

BSPlib standard and implementation

Standard: BSPlib: the BSP Programming Library, by Jonathan Hill, Bill McColl, Dan Stefanescu, Mark Goudreau, Kevin Lang, Satish Rao, Torsten Suel, Thanasis Tsantilas, and Rob Bisseling, version with C examples or with Fortran 77 examples. Published in Parallel Computing 24 (1998) pp. 1947-1980.

Implementations:

• Oxford BSP toolset.
• Alternative implementation (with extensions) Paderborn PUB library.
• Recent patches by Peter Krusche (University of Warwick) to make the Oxford BSP toolset and PUB running on an SGI Altix machine. Released October 2005.
• BSPonMPI by Wijnand J. Suijlen (Utrecht University). Open-source project at SourceForge. Provides BSPlib version on top of MPI. Makes BSPlib portable to almost every parallel computer. Version 0.2 released July 2006. Version 0.3 fixes a bug on certain architectures and will offically be released February/March 2010. It is already available here: BSPonMPI version 0.3

Textbooks on BSP

Parallel Scientific Computation: A Structured Approach using BSP and MPI, by Rob H. Bisseling, Oxford University Press, March 2004. 324 pages. ISBN 0-19-852939-2.

Email list

Most BSP Worldwide activities are carried out using electronic communications via email and web pages. An email list (bspall-l "at" science.uu.nl ) has been established to carry messages to those interested in all aspects of BSP Worldwide activities. We try to fight spam with various means.
To subscribe or unsubscribe, or post, see the instructions for bspall-l.