Composites: trees for data parallel programming

Abstract

Data parallel programming languages offer ease of programming and debugging and scalability of parallel programs to increasing numbers of processors. Unfortunately, the usefulness of these languages for non-scientific programmers and loosely coupled parallel machines is currently limited. We present the composite tree model which seeks to provide greater flexibility via parallel data types, support for more general, hierarchical parallelism, parallel control flow, and efficient execution on loosely coupled, coarse grained parallel machines such as workstation networks. The composite tree model is a new model of parallel programming based on merging data parallelism with object oriented programming languages, and can be implemented as a small set of extensions to any pure, static typed, object oriented programming language.<>