ARCH, an object oriented MPI-based library for asynchronous and loosely synchronous parallel system programming

Abstract

There are important classes of parallel systems built from components that need to be described in terms of asynchronous concurrent activities. For such systems, the model on which MPI relies proves to be far too restrictive. This paper presents ARCH, a Library of tools for concurrent parallel programming that was designed to address these classes of systems. The new library was implemented on top of MPI with C++. The latter was not just used as a development language. Instead, It was tried to transmit through ARCH all the benefits and power of the object oriented technology. ARCH consists of several packages of C++ classes. The first package deals with threading. Two classes provide functions for thread and concurrent process construction, destruction, initialization, scheduling, and so forth. The library supplies three additional packages for thread/process synchronization and communication, each associated with a well identified communication model: (1) point-to-point synchronous, (2) point-to-point asynchronous and (3) one-sided via direct write/read function calls. Finally, the library proposes a package providing spread pointers and arrays.