Abstract

A data-parallel style of programming is one method of utilising the enormous computing power available on today's parallel machines. It is becoming clear that the dataparallel paradigm is not tied to a particular "flavour" of parallel architecture, be it Single Instruction Multiple Data-stream (SIMD) or Multiple Instruction Multiple Data-stream (MIMD). The purpose of this paper is to give an introduction to the basic techniques that form the building blocks of a data-parallel paradigm. The combinatorial search problem of finding the shortest path between two nodes in a graph is investigated, and two parallel solutions are presented. The first is based upon the scan algorithm that forms the heart of many data-parallel applications; the second uses a technique from the parallel solution of a computational fluid dynamics problem. The examples demonstrate that a parallel solution to a given problem may not necessarily bear any resemblance to a sequential solution---although the parallel te...

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