Experience with a Portability Layer for Implementing Parallel Programming Systems

• Main Authors: Tim Rühl, Henri Bal, Gregory Benson, Raoul Bhoedjang, Koen Langendoen
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 1996
• Subjects: Orca
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.53.1676

Panda is a virtual machine designed to support portable implementations of parallel programming systems. It provides communication primitives and thread support to higher-level layers (such as a runtime system). We have used Panda to implement four parallel programming systems: Orca, data parallel Orca, PVM, and SR. The paper describes our experiences in implementing these systems using Panda and it evaluates the performance of the Panda-based implementations. 1 Introduction Portability is one of the most important issues in designing parallel software. The portability of parallel applications can be enhanced by using portable programming systems, but this leaves many of the problems to the implementor of such systems. In particular, it is difficult to obtain both portability and efficiency. In our research on the Orca [2] programming system, we use the well-known implementation technique of a virtual machine to achieve portability. We have designed a virtual machine, called Panda [4].