PRAM programming: theory vs. practice

We investigate the practical viability of PRAM programming within the BSP framework. We argue that there is a necessity for PRAM computations in situations where the problem exhibits poor data locality. We introduce a C++ PRAM simulator that is built on top of the Oxford BSP Toolset, BSPlib, and provide a succinct PRAM language. Our approach achieves simplicity of programming over direct-mode BSP programming for reasonable overhead cost. We objectively compare optimized BSP algorithms with PRAM algorithms implemented with our library and provide encouraging experimental results for the latter style of programming.

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