This volume contains papers presented at the DIMACS workshop on Specification of Parallel Algorithms, held in May 1994 at Princeton University. The goal of the workshop was to bring together some of the best researchers in parallel languages, algorithms, and systems to present and discuss recent developments in their areas of expertise. Among the topics discussed were new specification techniques for concurrent and distributed systems, behavioral and operational specification techniques, new parallel language and system abstractions, novel concurrent architectures and systems, large-scale parallel systems, specification tools and environments, and proof techniques for concurrent systems.

There is a software gap between the hardware potential and the performance that can be attained using today's software parallel program development tools. The tools need manual intervention by the programmer to parallelize the code. Programming a parallel computer requires closely studying the target algorithm or application, more so than in the traditional sequential programming we have all learned. The programmer must be aware of the communication and data dependencies of the algorithm or application. This book provides the techniques to explore the possible ways to program a parallel computer for a given application.

Focusing on algorithms for distributed-memory parallel architectures, Parallel Algorithms presents a rigorous yet accessible treatment of theoretical models of parallel computation, parallel algorithm design for homogeneous and heterogeneous platforms, complexity and performance analysis, and essential notions of scheduling. The book extract

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Parallel-Algorithms for Regular Architectures is the first book to concentrate exclusively on algorithms and paradigms for programming parallel computers such as the hypercube, mesh, pyramid, and mesh-of-trees.

Foreword by Bjarne Stroustrup Software is generally acknowledged to be the single greatest obstacle preventing mainstream adoption of massively-parallel computing. While sequential applications are routinely ported to platforms ranging from PCs to mainframes, most parallel programs only ever run on one type of machine. One reason for this is that most parallel programming systems have failed to insulate their users from the architectures of the machines on which they have run. Those that have been platform-independent have usually also had poor performance. Many researchers now believe that object-oriented languages may offer a solution. By hiding the architecture-specific constructs required for high performance inside platform-independent abstractions, parallel object-oriented programming systems may be able to combine the speed of massively-parallel computing with the comfort of sequential programming. Parallel Programming Using C++ describes fifteen parallel programming systems based on C++, the most popular object-oriented language of today. These systems cover the whole spectrum of parallel programming paradigms, from data parallelism through dataflow and distributed shared memory to message-passing control parallelism. For the parallel programming community, a common parallel application is discussed in each chapter, as part of the description of the system itself. By comparing the implementations of the polygon overlay problem in each system, the reader can get a better sense of their expressiveness and functionality for a common problem. For the systems community, the chapters contain a discussion of the implementation of the various compilers and runtime systems. In addition to discussing the performance of polygon overlay, several of the contributors also discuss the performance of other, more substantial, applications. For the research community, the contributors discuss the motivations for and philosophy of their systems. As well, many of the chapters include critiques that complete the research arc by pointing out possible future research directions. Finally, for the object-oriented community, there are many examples of how encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism can be used to control the complexity of developing, debugging, and tuning parallel software.

The book provides a practical guide to computational scientists and engineers to help advance their research by exploiting the superpower of supercomputers with many processors and complex networks. This book focuses on the design and analysis of basic parallel algorithms, the key components for composing larger packages for a wide range of applications.