A general-purpose model for heterogeneous computation

Heterogeneous computing environments are becoming an increasingly popular platform for executing parallel applications. Such environments consist of a diverse set of machines and offer considerably more computational power at a lower cost than a parallel computer. Efficient heterogeneous parallel applications must account for the differences inherent in such an environment. For example, faster machines should possess more data items than their slower counterparts and communication should be minimized over slow network links. Current parallel applications are not designed with such heterogeneity in mind. Thus, a new approach is necessary for designing efficient heterogeneous parallel programs. We propose