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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Savas Parastatidis
Advances in hardware technologies combined with decreased costs have started a trend towards massively parallel architectures that utilise commodity components. It is thought unreasonable to expect software developers to manage the high degree of parallelism that is made available by these architectures. This thesis argues that a new programming model is essential for the development of parallel applications and presents a model which embraces the notions of object-orientation and implicit identification of parallelism. The new model allows software engineers to concentrate on development issues, using the object-oriented paradigm, whilst being freed from the burden of explicitly managing parallel activity. To support the programming model, the semantics of an execution model are defined and implemented as part of a run-time support system for object-oriented parallel applications. Details of the novel techniques from the run-time system, in the areas of lazy task creation and object-based, distributed shared memory, are presented. The tasklet construct for representing potentially parallel computation is introduced and further developed by this thesis. Three caching techniques that take advantage of memory access patterns exhibited in object-oriented applications are explored. Finally, the performance characteristics of the introduced run-time techniques are analysed through a number of benchmark applications.
Author(s): Parastatidis S
Publication type: Report
Publication status: Published
Series Title: Department of Computing Science Technical Report Series
Year: 2001
Pages: 234
Print publication date: 01/10/2001
Source Publication Date: October 2001
Report Number: 748
Institution: Department of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Place Published: Newcastle upon Tyne
URL: http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/publications/trs/papers/748.pdf
