An Application Experience with
an Implicitly Parallel Composition Language
R. Jagannathan and Chris Dodd
SRI International
Computer Science Laboratory
333 Ravenswood Avenue
Menlo Park, California 94025
{jaggan,dodd}@csl.sri.com
Abstract
We describe our experiences with a very high-level parallel
composition language (called GLU) that enables rapid construction of
parallel applications using sequential building blocks (extracted from
existing sequential applications) and their execution on diverse
parallel computer systems. GLU is sufficiently rich to succinctly
express different forms of parallelism --- from function parallelism
to data parallelism and from pipeline parallelism to tree parallelism.
We show by example how a typical sequential application can be
converted to a parallel one in GLU and executed on different parallel
systems. We also show how GLU has been used to convert two widely
used sequentially written, inherently parallel workstation
applications --- the make utility and a raytracing system --- to
parallel equivalents that can then be run much faster on a network of
workstations.
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