EASY-TO-USE OBJECT-ORIENTED PARALLEL PROCESSING WITH MENTAT

作     者：GRIMSHAW, AS 

作者机构：Dept. of Comput. Sci. Virginia Univ. Charlottesville VA 

出 版 物：《COMPUTER》 (IEEE计算机杂志)

年 卷 期：1993年第26卷第5期

页      面：39-51页

核心收录：

学科分类：0808[工学-电气工程] 08[工学] 0835[工学-软件工程] 0812[工学-计算机科学与技术（可授工学、理学学位）] 

基　　金：National Science Foundation, NSF, (ASC-9201822, CDA-8922545) National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, (NAG-1-1181) 

主　　题：C++ Intel iPSC/2 Intel iPSC/860 Mentat Mentat programming language Mentat runtime system Silicon Graphics Iris Sun 3 Sun 4 workstation architecture-independent parallel programs high level languages object-oriented parallel processing object-oriented programming parallel processing parallel programming 

摘      要：Writing portable applications for MIMD (multiple-instruction, multiple-data) architectures has proven to be more difficult than writing sequential software. This is due in large part to the lack of easy-to-use, high-level abstractions. Mentat is an object-oriented parallel processing system designed to directly address the difficulty of developing architecture-independent parallel programs. Its fundamental objectives are to provide easy-to-use parallelism, achieve high performance via parallel execution, and facilitate the portability of applications across a wide range of platforms. The premise underlying Mentat is that it is the lack of appropriate abstractions that has kept parallel architectures difficult to program and hence made them inaccessible to mainstream, production system programmers. The Mentat approach combines a medium-grain, data-driven computation model with the object-oriented programming paradigm. The data-driven computation model supports high degrees of parallelism, while the use of the object-oriented paradigm permits hiding much of the parallel environment from the programmer. The Mentat system consists of two components, the Mentat Programming Language (MPL) and the Mentat runtime system. The MPL is an object-oriented programming language based on C++. The programmer is responsible for identifying those classes, called Mentat classes, whose member functions are of sufficient computational complexity to allow efficient parallel execution. Instances of Mentat classes are used like C++ classes. The data and control dependencies between Mentat class instances involved in invocation, communication, and synchronization are detected and managed by the compiler and runtime system without programmer intervention. Mentat is available via anonymous FTP and has been implemented on Sun workstations, the Silicon Graphics Iris, the Intel iPSC/2, and the Intel iPSC/860. This article presents the Mentat programming language, including several examples, the M