Abstract

Abstract. Platform portability is one of the utmost demanded properties of a system today, due to the diversity of runtime execution environment ofwide-area networks, and parallel programs arenoexceptions. However, parallel execution environments are VERYdiverse, could change dynamically, while performance must be portable as well. As a result, techniques for achieving platform portability are sometimes not appropriate, or could restrict the programming model, e.g., to simple message passing. Instead, we propose the use of re ection for achieving platform portability of parallel programs. As a prototype experiment, a software DSM system called OMPC++ was created which utilizes the compile-time metaprogramming features of OpenC++ 2.5 to generate a message-passing MPC++ code from a SPMD-style, shared-memory C++ program. The translation creates memory management objects on each node to manage the consistency protocols for objects arrays residing on di erent nodes. Read- and write- barriers are automatically inserted on references to shared objects. The resulting system turned out to be quite easy to construct compared to traditional DSM construction methodologies. We evaluated this system on a PC cluster linked by the Myrinet gigabit network, and resulted in reasonable performance compared to a high-performance SMP. 1

Citations