ALWAN: A skeleton programming language

Abstract

ALWAN is a parallel language and programming environment developed at the Parallel lab of the University of Basle (PUB). The design goals of ALWAN are to increase the programmability of parallel applications, enable performance portability, support the reuse of software components, and mixed-language programming. Parallel programs consist of (sequential) calculation and (parallel) coordination parts. To address the major difficulties in parallel programming, the ALWAN language provides high level constructs for the description of parallel coordination aspects such as data partitioning and distribution, process topology management and communication aspects. As ALWAN is intended to specify only the coordination of an algorithm, it provides an interface to other, widely used, sequential languages, such as C and FORTRAN. Coordination skeletons and sequential building blocks are processed by the programming environment (ALWAN compiler and support libraries) which can automatically generate programs for various parallel architectures.

This research project is sponsored by the Swiss Priority Programme in Informatics Research, Grant 5003-034357.