Gelernter: Languages & Compilers for P : Languages & Compilers for P

These contributions provide a timely overview of research being done in universities and industry on state-of-the-art programming languages and compilers for parallel computers.The topics covered include languages and language extensions for parallel computing - a status report on CONSUL, a future-based parallel language for a general-purpose high-parallel computer; COOL, blackboard programming in shared Prolog, refined C, the XYZ abstraction levels of pokerlike languages, and the PARSEQ project.

There are chapters on interactive/graphical environments that extend or complement traditional programming languages, on fundamental parallelization techniques and parallelization systems, on techniques for the automatic extraction of fine-grain parallelism, and on parallelization techniques targeted at shared-memory parallel processors, distributed memory parallel processors, and dataflow computers.Tools for parallel programming, debugging, and performance enhancement are investigated, and work being done on the parallelization of C and Lisp reported.

In the area of compilation and restructuring of parallel programs, there are chapters on the translation of C-Linda, machine code optimization for the Cray computer, and techniques for the further parallelization of parallel programs.David Gelernter is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Yale University.

Alexandru Nicolau is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Irvine, and David Padua is Associate Director of the Center for Supercomputing Research and Development at the University of Illinois, Urbana.