Designing Scalable Object Oriented Parallel Applications (Research Note)

The SCOOPP (Scalable Object Oriented Parallel Programming) system efficiently adapts, at run-time, an object oriented parallel application to any distributed memory system. It extracts as much parallelism as possible at compile time, and it removes excess of parallel tasks and messages through run-time packing. These object and call aggregation techniques are briefly presented. A design methodology was developed for three main types of scalable applications: pipeline, divide & conquer and farming. This paper reviews how the method can help programmers to design portable and efficient parallel applications. It details its application to a farming case study (image threshold) with measured performance data, and compares with programmer's tuned versions in a Pentium cluster.