A programming model which allows users to program with high productivity and which produces high performance executions has been a goal for decades. This dissertation makes progress towards this elusive goal by describing the design and implementation of the Galois system, a parallel programming model for shared-memory, multicore machines. Central to the design is the idea that scheduling of a program can be decoupled from the core computational operator and data structures. However, efficient programs often require application-specific scheduling to achieve best performance. To bridge this gap, an extensible and abstract scheduling policy language is proposed, which allows programmers to focus on selecting high-level scheduling policies while delegating the tedious task of implementing the policy to a scheduler synthesizer and runtime system. Implementations of deterministic and prioritized scheduling also are described. An evaluation of a well-studied benchmark suite reveals that factoring programs into operators, schedulers and data structures can produce significant performance improvements over unfactored approaches. Comparison of the Galois system with existing programming models for graph analytics shows significant performance improvements, often orders of magnitude more, due to (1) better support for the restrictive programming models of existing systems and (2) better support for more sophisticated algorithms and scheduling, which cannot be expressed in other systems. / text

Clusters of commodity, "off the shelf" workstations have given developers and users access to scalable and affordable computing resources. However, unlike large, symmetric multi-processing machines, these clusters have an up front cost in complexity, both for the developer and the user. Existing software frameworks have attempted to mitigate this complexity with varied success. In most frameworks, the user is forgotten and left to deal with an unwieldy application. This thesis presents the design, development and testing of a new C++ computer programming library, Scopira Agents Library (SAL). SAL is a message passing interface and implementation suitable for building parallel applications, with a focus on developer ease of use and user application deployment specification. The target developers and users of such a solution would be those who prefer an easy to develop library, with simpler deployment and application integration options with acceptable sacrifices to performance and scalability. The novelty of this parallel programming library is that it is more user-friendly than other existing libraries. This novelty has two major facets: (i) programmer-usability and productivity and (ii) application integration. Together, they permit a wider range of programmers to utilize parallel programming in a wider range of new and existing applications. This goal, user-friendliness, is rare among current parallel programming libraries. The result of the novelty is that parallel programming can be embedded into more applications, especially desktop applications. The user base and use cases for parallel applications can be increased, resulting in more efficient use of resources in a variety of applications. With increased efficiency, work can be performed in less time and larger problems can be tackled.

Clusters of commodity, "off the shelf" workstations have given developers and users access to scalable and affordable computing resources. However, unlike large, symmetric multi-processing machines, these clusters have an up front cost in complexity, both for the developer and the user. Existing software frameworks have attempted to mitigate this complexity with varied success. In most frameworks, the user is forgotten and left to deal with an unwieldy application. This thesis presents the design, development and testing of a new C++ computer programming library, Scopira Agents Library (SAL). SAL is a message passing interface and implementation suitable for building parallel applications, with a focus on developer ease of use and user application deployment specification. The target developers and users of such a solution would be those who prefer an easy to develop library, with simpler deployment and application integration options with acceptable sacrifices to performance and scalability. The novelty of this parallel programming library is that it is more user-friendly than other existing libraries. This novelty has two major facets: (i) programmer-usability and productivity and (ii) application integration. Together, they permit a wider range of programmers to utilize parallel programming in a wider range of new and existing applications. This goal, user-friendliness, is rare among current parallel programming libraries. The result of the novelty is that parallel programming can be embedded into more applications, especially desktop applications. The user base and use cases for parallel applications can be increased, resulting in more efficient use of resources in a variety of applications. With increased efficiency, work can be performed in less time and larger problems can be tackled.

With the arrival of many general purpose shared memory multiple processor (multiprocessor) computers into the commercial arena during the mid-1980's, a rift has opened between the raw processing power offered by the emerging hardware and the relative inability of its operating software to effectively deliver this power to potential users. This rift stems from the fact that, currently, no computational model with the capability to elegantly express parallel activity is mature enough to be universally accepted, and used as the basis for programming languages to exploit the parallelism that multiprocessors offer. To add to this, there is a lack of software tools to assist programmers in the processes of designing and debugging parallel programs. Although much research has been done in the field of programming languages, no undisputed candidate for the most appropriate language for programming shared memory multiprocessors has yet been found. This thesis examines why this state of affairs has arisen and proposes programming language constructs, together with a programming methodology and environment, to close the ever widening hardware to software gap. The novel programming constructs described in this thesis are intended for use in imperative languages even though they make use of the synchronisation inherent in the dataflow model by using the semantics of single assignment when operating on shared data, so giving rise to the term shared values. As there are several distinct parallel programming paradigms, matching flavours of shared value are developed to permit the concise expression of these paradigms.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2008. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 136-147).

Thesis (M.S.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1992. / Vita. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 73-76). Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1997. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. [163]-174).

Thesis (M.S.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1990. / Vita. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 94-99). Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Florida, 2002. / Title from title page of source document. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references.