ARCH, An Object-Oriented Library for Asynchronous and Loosely Synchronous System Programming
| dc.contributor.author | Adamo, Jean-Marc | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2007-04-04T14:11:59Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2007-04-04T14:11:59Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 1995-12 | en_US |
| dc.description.abstract | ARCH is a C++-based library for asynchronous and loosely synchronous system programming. The current version offers a set of programming constructs that are outlined below: *** Threads: The construct is presented as a class from which the user can derive his own classes. The class encapsulates a small set of status variables and offers a set of functions for declaration, initialization, scheduling, priority setting, yielding and stopping. *** Processes: A process is a more regular and structured programming construct whose scheduling and termination obey additional synchronization rules. Together with the synchronous point-to-point communication system offered in the library (see below), processes favor a parallel programming style similar to OCCAM's (actually, an extension of it that removes most static features and allows processes to share data). The semantics of this model is well understood and will undoubtedly facilitate the development of correct large asynchronous code. The library has been designed so that the C++ compiler is able to check the static semantics of programs (complete type checking, send-recv correct matching, ...). *** Synchronous communication: Threads and processes synchronize and communicate via communication channels. There are four types of communication channels for local or remote synchronization or synchronous point-to-point communication. Inter-processor channels are essentially tools for building virtual topologies. The channel classes offer functions to send to or receive from a channel and get the size of the latest received message. More specialized synchronization-communication tools can be derived from channels. *** Global data and pointers: Beside threads, the library offers basic tools for developing distributed data abstractions. Global data are data that can be defined at given locations in the distributed memory but are visible from all processors. Global pointers are a generalization of C++ pointers that allow for addressing global data at any place over the distributed memory. As usual pointers, global pointers are subjected to arithmetic and logic manipulations (incrementation, dereferencing, indexing, comparision...). The library provides basic operators for global data and pointer definition. *** Global read/write functions: Global pointer expressions provide global references over the distributed memory that can subsequently be used asarguments to global read/write functions. These functions allow the processors to get access to all global data regardless of their locations over the distributed memory. In their most complete form, the read/write functions operate as remote procedure calls. At the programmer's level, global read/write functions appear as "one-sided": a read/write operationis executed on the processor that needs to read/write global data but need not be explicitly handled by the processor associated to the memory holding the data. *** Spread and remote Arrays. Two basic distributed data structures have been built in the library. Spread arrays are arrays that have some of their dimensions spread over the distributed memory according to a given policy. Remote arrays are arrays that are defined at a given place in the distributed memory but can be accessed from any other. The spread and remote array classes (SpreadArray and RemoteArray) provide functions for global reference calculation. Global references can subsequently be used as arguments to global read/write functions. One can specialize global pointers to operate on spread or remote arrays. The global pointer class (Star class) offers distinct arithmetic and logic operator sets for unassigned, spread and remote global pointers. The library encourages parallel code writing in a style that relies on the object-oriented approach: first, build the abstractions that the application at hand relies on; next, make an efficient implementation of the abstraction; and finally, develop the application on top of them. The abstractions can be distributed data types derived from those built in the library (spread and remote arrays: see code of the segmentation algorithm provided with the library) or new distributed types built in the same way or types reused from other applications. This approach should favor parallel code production with many desirable properties such as efficiency, portability, reusability, ... . The library uses MPI as a communication interface. The current implementation runs on the IBM-SP2. Two versions of the library have currently been released.The first one is based on the IBM C++ compiler and MPI library. The second one makes use of the GNU g++ compiler and the MPICH public domain version of MPI. Porting the latter to any parallel machine supporting these two software systems should be straightforward. | en_US |
| dc.format.extent | 650995 bytes | |
| dc.format.extent | 570900 bytes | |
| dc.format.mimetype | application/pdf | |
| dc.format.mimetype | application/postscript | |
| dc.identifier.citation | http://techreports.library.cornell.edu:8081/Dienst/UI/1.0/Display/cul.tc/95-228 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1813/5533 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | en_US |
| dc.publisher | Cornell University | en_US |
| dc.subject | theory center | en_US |
| dc.title | ARCH, An Object-Oriented Library for Asynchronous and Loosely Synchronous System Programming | en_US |
| dc.type | technical report | en_US |