Supporting shared data structures on distributed memory architectures

  • Authors:
  • C. Koelbel;P. Mehrotra;J. Van Rosendale

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN;ICASE, NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA;ICASE, NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA

  • Venue:
  • PPOPP '90 Proceedings of the second ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles & practice of parallel programming
  • Year:
  • 1990

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Abstract

Programming nonshared memory systems is more difficult than programming shared memory systems, since there is no support for shared data structures. Current programming languages for distributed memory architectures force the user to decompose all data structures into separate pieces, with each piece “owned” by one of the processors in the machine, and with all communication explicitly specified by low-level message-passing primitives. This paper presents a new programming environment for distributed memory architectures, providing a global name space and allowing direct access to remote parts of data values. We describe the analysis and program transformations required to implement this environment, and present the efficiency of the resulting code on the NCUBE/7 and IPSC/2 hypercubes.