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. Its main means of communication is a mailing list, bspall, and this website.

News and recent implementations

• February 16, 2019. BSPonMPI v1.0, complete rewrite of the BSPonMPI library by Wijnand Suijlen. Provides BSPlib version on top of MPI. Makes BSPlib portable to almost every parallel computer.
• July 3-5, 2019, The 12th International Symposium High-Level Parallel Programming and Applications, Linköping, Sweden.
• May 8, 2018. MulticoreBSP for C version 2.0.3 released. A BSPlib version in C aimed at multicore architectures, developed by Albert-Jan Yzelman. Version 2.0.3 brings checkpointing support, flexible APIs and debug and profiling compilation modes.
• 2018, try BSML online: A web-based interpreter and REPL for the BSML language by Julien Tesson.
• February 27, 2018 Bulk, by Jan-Willem Buurlage, Tom Bannink and Rob H. Bisseling, version 1.0 released. Accompanying paper A modern C++ interface for bulk synchronous parallel programs in: Proceedings EuroPar 2018, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 11014, pp. 519–532.
• July 10-11, 2017, The 10th International Symposium on High-Level Parallel Programming and Applications, Valladolid, Spain
• January 18, 2017. Epiphany BSP version 1.0 released. Library for developing applications for the Parallella board.
• April 13-14, 2016. The Present and Future Bulk Synchronous Parallel Computing, minisymposium at the SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing in Paris. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
• December 16, 2015. Zefiros BSPLib by Mick van Duijn and Paul Visscher is a fast, and easy to use C++ implementation of the BSP model based on threading.
• May 14, 2014. MulticoreBSP for C version 1.2 released. A BSPlib version in C aimed at multicore architectures, developed by Albert-Jan Yzelman at the KU Leuven and the Intel ExaScience Lab. Version 1.2 brings improved pinning support and also extended C++ support by the addition of templated BSPlib primitives. A Java version is also available.
• March 9, 2011. Leslie Valiant, founder of BSP, wins the 2010 ACM Turing award.

Active BSP research

BSPlib standard

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.

Update of standard for C: MulticoreBSP for C: A High-Performance Library for Shared-Memory Parallel Programming by A. N. Yzelman, R. H. Bisseling, D. Roose, and K. Meerbergen, International Journal of Parallel Programming 42 No. 4 (2014) pp 619–642.

Previous implementations

• Oxford BSP toolset version 1.4 by Jonathan Hill (1998)
• BSPonMPI by Wijnand J. Suijlen (Utrecht University). Open-source project at SourceForge. Version 0.2 released July 2006. Version 0.3 fixes a bug on certain architectures and is available here: BSPonMPI version 0.3

Textbooks on BSP

Algorithmes et programmation parallèles - Théorie avec BSP et pratique avec OCaml, by Gaétan Hains. Ellipse, May 2018. 168 pages, ISBN 9782340024663. An English translation is forthcoming.

Parallel Scientific Computation: A Structured Approach using BSP and MPI, by Rob H. Bisseling, Oxford University Press, March 2004. 324 pages. ISBN 9780198529392. A new edition is forthcoming.

Reviews

Thinking in Sync: The Bulk-Synchronous Parallel Approach to Large-Scale Computing, by Rob H. Bisseling and Albert-Jan N. Yzelman, ACM Computing reviews, Vol. 57, No. 6 (2016), pp. 322-327. Hot Topic essay on state-of-the-art in bulk-synchronous parallel computing, with related web resources.

BSP (bulk synchronous parallelism) by Alex Tiskin, Encyclopedia of Parallel Computing (2011) pp 192-199.

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.