A generic fine-grained parallel C

Abstract

With the present availability of parallel processors of vastly different architectures, there is a need for a common language interface to multiple types of machines. The parallel C compiler, currently under development, is intended to be such a language. This language is based on the belief that an algorithm designed around fine-grained parallelism can be mapped relatively easily to different parallel architectures, since a large percentage of the parallelism has been identified. The compiler generates a FORTH-like machine-independent intermediate code. A machine-dependent translator will reside on each machine to generate the appropriate executable code, taking advantage of the particular architectures. The goal of this project is to allow a user to run the same program on such machines as the Massively Parallel Processor, the CRAY, the Connection Machine, and the CYBER 205 as well as serial machines such as VAXes, Macintoshes and Sun workstations.