The design, implementation and evaluation of Jade: a portable, implicitly parallel programming language

Over the last decade, research in parallel computer architecture has led to the development of many new parallel machines. These machines have the potential to dramatically increase the resources available for solving important computational problems. The widespread use of these machines, however, has been limited by the difficulty of developing useful parallel software. This thesis presents the design, implementation and evaluation of Jade, a new programming language for parallel computations that exploit task-level concurrency. Jade is structured as a set of constructs that programmers use to specify how a program written in a standard sequential, imperative language accesses data. The implementation dynamically analyzes these specifications to automatically extract the concurrency and map the computation onto the parallel machine. The resulting parallel execution preserves the semantics of the original serial program. We have implemented Jade on a wide variety of parallel computing platforms: shared-memory multiprocessors such as the Stanford DASH machine, homogeneous message-passing machines such as the Intel iPSC/860, and on heterogeneous networks of workstations. Jade programs port without modification between all of these platforms. We evaluate the design and implementation of Jade by parallelizing several complete scientific and engineering applications in Jade and executing these applications on several computational platforms. We analyze how well Jade supports the process of developing these applications and present results that characterize how well they perform.