Distributed-memory machines offer a very high level of performance, flexibility and scalability. But the memory organization of this kind of machine determines that processes on different processors must communicate explicitly by sending and receiving messages. As a result, the programmer faces the enormously difficult task of detailed planning of algorithm-irrelevant, low-level communication issues. This level of programming resembles writing assembly programs for a sequential machine. ACE is a message-passing language with abstract communication statements. It was defined by Dr. Jingke Li at Portland State University. The communication in ACE is still explicit, but it is abstracted to a higher level. The abstraction can help balance the needs of ease of programming and high performance. This thesis discusses how those high-level communication abstractions can be transformed into low-level communication routines. It presents the design and implementation of a compiler that transforms an ACE program into a C program with low-level communication routines. The compiler is implemented for the Intel iPSC/2 hypercube multiprocessor machine. Compared to their low-level counterparts, ACE programs are easier to write and are more understandable. Compared to their high level counterparts, more efficient code can be generated since the communication information is expressed explicitly in ACE and the compiler itself is much less complex. ACE also enables the users to fine tune some critical communication segments. Some well known parallel algorithms written in ACE are compiled by the compiler as examples, and experimental results of their performance are included.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:pdx.edu/oai:pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu:open_access_etds-5639 |
| Date | 05 November 1992 |
| Creators | Song, Jun |
| Publisher | PDXScholar |
| Source Sets | Portland State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Dissertations and Theses |
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