The Modula-2* environment for parallel programming

Abstract

Presents a portable parallel programming environment for Modula-2*, an explicitly parallel machine-independent extension of Modula-2. Modula-2* offers synchronous and asynchronous parallelism, a global single address space, and automatic data and process distribution. The Modula-2* system consists of a compiler, a debugger, a cross-architecture make, graphical X Windows control panel, run-time systems for different machines, and sets of scalable parallel libraries. The existing implementation targets the MasPar MP series of massively parallel processors (SIMD), the KSR-1 parallel computer (MIMD), heterogeneous LANs of workstations (MIMD), and single workstations (SISD). We describe the important components of the Modula-2* environment, and discuss selected implementation issues. We focus on how we achieve a high degree of portability for our system, while at the same time ensuring efficiency.<>