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Forklight: A control-synchronous parallel programming language

  • Track C3: Computational Science
  • Conference paper
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High-Performance Computing and Networking (HPCN-Europe 1999)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1593))

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Abstract

ForkLight is an imperative, task-parallel programming language for massively parallel shared memory machines. It is based on ANSI C, follows the SPMD model of parallel program execution, provides a sequentially consistent shared memory, and supports dynamically nested parallelism. While no assumptions are made on uniformity of memory access time or instruction-level synchronicity of the underlying hardware, ForkLight offers a simple but powerful mechanism for coordination of parallel processes in the tradition and notation of PRAM algorithms: Beyond its asynchronous default execution mode, ForkLight offers a mode for control-synchronous execution that relates the program's block structure to parallel control flow.

We give a scheme for compiling ForkLight to C with calls to a very small set of basic shared memory access operations like atomic fetch&add. This yields portability across parallel architectures and exploits the local optimizations of their native C compilers. Our implementation is publically available; performance results are reported. We also discuss translation to OpenMP.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. FB IV-Informatik, Universität Trier, 54286, Trier, Germany

    Christoph W. Keßler & Helmut Seidl

Authors
  1. Christoph W. Keßler
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  2. Helmut Seidl
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Peter Sloot Marian Bubak Alfons Hoekstra Bob Hertzberger

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© 1999 Springer-Verlag

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Keßler, C.W., Seidl, H. (1999). Forklight: A control-synchronous parallel programming language. In: Sloot, P., Bubak, M., Hoekstra, A., Hertzberger, B. (eds) High-Performance Computing and Networking. HPCN-Europe 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1593. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg . https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0100613

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0100613

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-65821-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-48933-7

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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