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The Fork95 parallel programming language: Design, implementation, application

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Abstract

Fork95 is an imperative parallel programming language intended to express algorithms for synchronous shared memory machines (PRAMs). It is based on ANSI C and offers additional constructs to hierarchically divide processor groups into subgroups and manage shared and private address subspaces. Fork95 makes the assembly-level synchronicity of the underlying hardware available to the programmer at the language level. Nevertheless, it supports locally asynchronous computation where desired by the programmer. We present a one pass compiler, fcc, which compiles Fork95 and C programs to the SB-PRAM machine. The SB-PRAM is a lock-step synchronous, massively parallel multiprocessor currently being built at Saarbrücken University, with a physically shared memory and uniform memory access time. We examine three important types of parallel computation frequently used for the parallel solution of real-world problems. While farming and parallel divide-and-conquer are directly supported by Fork95 language constructs, pipelining can be easily expressed using existing language features; an additional language construct for pipelining is not required.

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  1. Fachbereich IV-Informatik, Universität Trier, D-54286, Trier, Germany

    Christoph W. Keßler & Helmut Seidl

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  1. Christoph W. Keßler
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  2. Helmut Seidl
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Keßler, C.W., Seidl, H. The Fork95 parallel programming language: Design, implementation, application. Int J Parallel Prog 25, 17–50 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02700045

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