There has been a great deal of interest recently in the development of general-purpose bridging models for parallel computation. Models such as the BSP and LogP have been proposed as more realistic alternatives to the widely used PRAM model. The BSP and LogP models imply a rather different style for designing algorithms when compared with the PRAM model. Indeed, while many consider data parallelism as a convenient style, and the shared-memory abstraction as an easyto-use platform, the bandwidth limitations of current machines have diverted much attention to message-passing and distributed-memory models (such as the BSP and LogP) that account more properly for these limitations. In this paper we consider the question of whether a shared-memory model can serve as an effective bridging model for parallel computation. In particular, can a shared-memory model be as effective as, say, the BSP? As a candidate for a bridging model, we introduce the Queuing Shared-Memory (QSM) model, which accounts for limited communication bandwidth while still providing a simple shared-memory abstraction. We substantiate the ability of the QSM to serve as a bridging model by providing a simple work-preserving emulation of the QSM on both the BSP, and on a related model, the (d, x)-BSP. We present evidence that the features of the QSM are essential to its effectiveness as a bridging model. In addition, we describe scenarios

The queue-read, queue-write (qrqw) parallel random access machine (pram) model permits concurrent reading and writing to shared memory locations, but at a cost proportional to the number of readers/writers to any one memory location in a given step. The qrqw pram model reflects the contention properties of most commercially available parallel machines more accurately than either the well-studied crcw pram or erew pram models, and can be efficiently emulated with only logarithmic slowdown on hypercubetype non-combining networks. This paper describes fast, low-contention, work-optimal, randomized qrqw pram algorithms for the fundamental problems of load balancing, multiple compaction, generating a random permutation, parallel hashing, and distributive sorting. These logarithmic or sublogarithmic time algorithms considerably improve upon the best known erew pram algorithms for these problems, while avoiding the high-contention steps typical of crcw pram algorithms. An illustrative expe...

This paper presents results for the queue-read, queue-write asynchronous parallel random access machine (qrqw asynchronous pram) model, which is the asynchronous variant of the qrqw pram model. The qrqw pram family of models, which was introduced earlier by the authors, permit concurrent reading and writing to shared memory locations, but each memory location is viewed as having a queue which can service at most one request at a time. In the basic qrqw pram model each processor executes a series of reads to shared memory locations, a series of local computation steps, and a series of writes to shared memory locations, and then synchronizes with all other processors; thus this can be viewed as a bulk-synchronous model. In contrast, in the qrqw asynchronous pram model discussed in this paper, there is no imposed bulksynchronization between processors, and each processor proceeds at its own pace. Thus, the qrqw asynchronous pram serves as a better model for designing and analyz...

We describe a general-purpose shared-memory model for parallel computation, called the qsm [21], which provides a high-level shared-memory abstraction for parallel algorithm design, as well as the ability to be emulated in an effective manner on the bsp, a lower-level, distributed-memory model. We present new emulation results that show that very little generality is lost by not having a `gap parameter' at memory.