Leo C. Breebaart

Booster : a high-level language for portable parallel algorithms

Abstract The development of programming languages suitable to express parallel algorithms in is crucial to the pace of acceptance of parallel processors for production applications. As in sequential programming, portability of parallel software is a strongly desirable feature. Portability in this respect means that given an algorithm description in a parallel programming language, it must be possible, with relatively little effort, to generate efficient code for several classes of (parallel) architectures. In this paper, the language Booster is described. Booster is a high-level, fourth-generation, parallel programming language. The language has been designed to program parallel algorithms for a wide variety of target parallel architectures. Booster has a strong separation of concerns, featuring amongst others a clear separation of algorithm description and algorithm decomposition and representation. Programs written in Booster are translated to imperative languages, such as FORTRAN or C, and can be easily integrated in large applications. Parallelism can be obtained by applying data and/or code decomposition. Once algorithm and decomposition are described the transformation is done automatically.

Semantics and implementation of a generalized forall statement for parallel languages

In this paper we present a generalized forall statement for parallel languages. The forall statement occurs in many (data) parallel languages and specifies which computations can be performed independently. Many different definitions of such a construct can be found in literature, with different conditions and execution models. We will show how forall constructs of a wide class of parallel languages can be mapped to this generalized forall statement. In addition, the forall statement we propose has the ability to spawn more complex independent activities than can be found in these languages. Denotational semantics are used to define the meaning of the forall and define only one possible program state change. It is shown that it is easy to use and that it is feasible to implement this forall efficiently.

An expressive annotation model for generating SPMD programs

This paper illustrates two major points. First, the authors discuss a general, conceptual model for SPMD program generating systems, and demonstrate that this model allows one to capture a broad range of different program semantics. Second, they show that it is possible to fit the concepts of this model into an annotation language that allows an SPMD program generating system to fully utilize all the possibilities present in the model.<<ETX>>

A Formal Approach to the Compilation of Data-Parallel Languages

In this paper we describe an approach to the compilation of data-parallel programming languages based on a formally defined intermediate language, called V-cal. The calculus V-cal was designed to represent the semantics of data management and control primitives found in data-parallel languages and allows to describe program transformations and optimizations as semantics preserving rewrite rules.

A Generalized forall Concept for Parallel Languages

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