ABCL/EM-4

(Doctoral Thesis, Mar. 1994)

Abstract: With recent developments of highly parallel computers, practical methods for developing programs on such machines become urgent. In this study, we regard our practical concurrent object-oriented programming language as a basic language for highly parallel machines and pursue necessary software approaches to achieving high performance by implementing the language system and developing application programs/parallel algorithms. As for the language system, we propose a language design suitable for parallel execution and implementation schemes that achieve high performance. Our implementation target is a fine-grained data-driven parallel computer, EM-4, developed at Electrotechnical Laboratories. We present and discuss the design of our runtime architecture and optimizing compiler, including reactive representations of objects, efficient management of message buffers with freelists, interruptible pipelined message sends, plan-do style intermediate code, an efficient implementation scheme for table look-up, and advanced register/storage allocation. As for application programs/parallel algorithms, we present concurrent object-oriented algorithms for highly parallel computers, (e.g., N-body problem) and evaluate them. We have developed a prototype compiler and a runtime system which run the N-body problem program on the real machine, and measured its performance. Performance measurements on EM-4 show that the cost of each remote object-creation and remote message-passing can be, in order, comparable to that of a sequential procedure call and the N-body algorithm based on the concurrent object-oriented models can be executed efficiently for a wide range of N. Our results indicate that the object-oriented concurrent computation models and languages are extremely suitable for realizing practical parallel systems.

You can get the postcript version of this thesis YasugiThesis-TR94-07-a4.ps.gz, YasugiThesis-TR94-07-letter.ps.gz.