Abstract

ion Lawrence A. Crowl Oregon State University and Thomas J. LeBlanc University of Rochester Parallel programming involves finding the potential parallelism in an application and mapping it to the architecture at hand. Since a typical application has more potential parallelism than any single architecture can exploit effectively, programmers usually limit their focus to the parallelism that the available control constructs express easily and that the given architecture exploits efficiently. This approach produces programs that exhibit much less parallelism than exists in the application, and whose performance depends critically on the underlying hardware and software. We argue for an alternative approach based on control abstraction. Control abstraction is the process by which programmers define new control constructs, specifying constraints on statement ordering separately from an implementation of that ordering. With control abstraction programmers can define and use a rich variety o...

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