A data-parallel programming library for education (DAPPLE)

Abstract

In the context of our overall goal to bring the concepts of parallel computing into the undergraduate curriculum, we set out to find a parallel-programming language for student use. To make it accessible to students at all levels, and to be independent of any particular hardware platform, we chose to design our own language, based on a data-parallel model and on C++. The result, DAPPLE, is a C++ class library designed to provide the illusion of a data-parallel programming language on conventional hardware and with conventional compilers. DAPPLE defines Vectors and Matrices as basic classes, with all the usual C++ operators overloaded to provide elementwise arithmetic. In addition, DAPPLE provides typical data-parallel operations like scans, permutations, and reductions. Finally, DAPPLE provides a parallel if-then-else statement to restrict the scope of the above operations to partial vectors or matrices.