Programming heterogeneous distributed architectures: the integration of massive parallel architectures and UNIX distributed systems

The resources of massive parallel architectures can be allocated and used via special-purpose interfaces, but the development phases are generally available via a host machine. The massive parallel architectures and their host systems represent heterogeneous architectures. This paper describes the Meiko Computing Surface, a transputer-based architecture that uses UNIX as host environment, and offers a library called CSTools to help users in expressing process creation and communication. A user can adopt CSTools as a uniform interface to write applications that run on the heterogeneous global architecture: CSTools need to be enhanced to solve the problems of process definition and their dynamic creation in UNIX machines. The extensions described in this paper achieve the portability of CSTools. Following this approach, applications can run firstly in the UNIX distributed (host) environment for a rapid prototype phase, and then on the target massively parallel architecture.<<ETX>>