ForkLight: A control-synchronous parallel programming language

Christoph W. Keßler, Helmut Seidl

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

2 Scopus citations

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, Forkkight 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, Forkkight offers a mode for control-synchronous execution that relates the program's block structure to parallel control flow. We give a scheme for compiling Forkkight 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.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationHigh-Performance Computing and Networking - 7th International Conference, HPCN Europe 1999, Proceedings
EditorsPeter Sloot, Alfons Hoekstra, Bob Hertzberger, Marian Bubak
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages525-534
Number of pages10
ISBN (Print)3540658211, 9783540658214
DOIs
StatePublished - 1999
Externally publishedYes
Event7th International Conference on High-Performance Computing and Networking, HPCN Europe 1999 - Amsterdam, Netherlands
Duration: 12 Apr 199914 Apr 1999

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume1593
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference7th International Conference on High-Performance Computing and Networking, HPCN Europe 1999
Country/TerritoryNetherlands
CityAmsterdam
Period12/04/9914/04/99

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