Optimal expression evaluation for data parallel architectures

A data parallel machine represents an array or other composite data structure by allocating one processor per data item. A pointwise operation can be performed between two such arrays in unit time, provided their corresponding elements are allocated in the same processors. If the arrays are not aligned in this fashion, the cost of moving one or both of them is part of the cost of operation. The choice of where to perform the operation then affects this cost. If an expression with several operands is to be evaluated, there may be many choices of where to perform the intermediate operations. An efficient algorithm is given to find the minimum cost way to evaluate an expression, for several different data parallel architectures. The algorithm applies to any architecture in which the metric describing the cost of moving an array has a property called robustness. This encompasses most of the common data parallel communication architectures, including meshes of arbitrary dimension and hypercubes.