ZPL: a machine independent programming language for parallel computers

The goal of producing architecture-independent parallel programs is complicated by the competing need for high performance. The ZPL programming language achieves both goals by building upon an abstract parallel machine and by providing programming constructs that allow the programmer to "see&qu...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on software engineering Vol. 26; no. 3; pp. 197 - 211
Main Authors: Chamberlain, B.L., Sung-Eun Choi, Lewis, C., Lin, C., Snyder, L., Weathersby, W.D.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York IEEE 01.03.2000
IEEE Computer Society
Subjects:
Buildings
Computer architecture
Computer languages
Computers
Concurrent computing
Construction equipment
Hardware
High performance computing
Laboratories
Mathematical models
Parallel computers
Parallel machines
Parallel processing
Parallel programming
Portability
Programmers
Programming
Programming languages
Programming profession
Semantics
Software engineering
Studies
ISSN:0098-5589, 1939-3520
Online Access:Get full text
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Description
Summary:The goal of producing architecture-independent parallel programs is complicated by the competing need for high performance. The ZPL programming language achieves both goals by building upon an abstract parallel machine and by providing programming constructs that allow the programmer to "see" this underlying machine. This paper describes ZPL and provides a comprehensive evaluation of the language with respect to its goals of performance, portability, and programming convenience. In particular, we describe ZPt's machine-independent performance model, describe the programming benefits of ZPL's region-based constructs, summarize the compilation benefits of the language's high-level semantics, and summarize empirical evidence that ZPL has achieved both high performance and portability on diverse machines such as the IBM SP-2, Cray T3E, and SGI Power Challenge.
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ISSN:0098-5589
1939-3520
DOI:10.1109/32.842947