Multicore parallel programming has some very difficult problems such as deadlocks during synchronizations and race conditions brought by concurrency. Added to the difficulty is the lack of a simple, well-accepted computing model for multicore architectures--because of that it is hard to develop powerful programming environments and debugging tools. To tackle the challenges, we promote a generalized stream computing model, inspired by previous researches on stream computing, that unifies parallelization strategies for programming language design, compiler design and operating system design. Our model provides a high-level abstraction in designing language constructs to convey concepts of concurrent operations, in organizing a program's runtime layout for parallel execution, and in scheduling concurrent instruction blocks through runtime and or operating systems. In this paper, we give a high-level description of the proposed model: we define the foundation of the model, show its simplicity through algebraic computational operation analysis, illustrate a programming framework enabled by the model, and demonstrate its potential through powerful design options for programming languages, compilers and operating systems.
Jade @cite_12 represents an important experiment on parallel programming language design. Jade preserves the serial semantics of a program, implicitly exploits task parallelism, and moves data closer to processors. However, if it was designed for a smooth transition from sequential programming to parallel programming, Jade's dependence on its type system and explicit object-access control still exposes low-level synchronizations to programmers. While arguably such low-level controls provide programming flexibility, not all the details are essential to algorithm design. On the other hand, we might consider that Jade lacks the power for defining concurrent execution structures in a larger program-scope.
@cite_12
2028267160
Jade is a portable, implicitly parallel language designed for exploiting task-level concurrency.Jade programmers start with a program written in a standard serial, imperative language, then use Jade constructs to declare how parts of the program access data. The Jade implementation uses this data access information to automatically extract the concurrency and map the application onto the machine at hand. The resulting parallel execution preserves the semantics of the original serial program. We have implemented Jade as an extension to C, and Jade implementations exist for s hared-memory multiprocessors, homogeneous message-passing machines, and heterogeneous networks of workstations. In this atricle we discuss the design goals and decisions that determined the final form of Jade and present an overview of the Jade implementation. We also present our experience using Jade to implement several complete scientific and engineering applications. We use this experience to evaluate how the different Jade language features were used in practice and how well Jade as a whole supports the process of developing parallel applications. We find that the basic idea of preserving the serial semantics simplifies the program development process, and that the concept of using data access specifications to guide the parallelization offers significant advantages over more traditional control-based approaches. We also find that the Jade data model can interact poorly with concurrency patterns that write disjoint pieces of a single aggregate data structure, although this problem arises in only one of the applications.