This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project addresses the important area of programming support for high performance parallel computing. At present, message-passing systems are the most widely used software systems for parallel computing, particularly for scientific and engineering applications. Message passing is conceptually quite straightforward and should be relatively easy to apply. Unfortunately, however, the fact that today's message-passing systems are based on the use of subprogram libraries, rather than on language-level constructs, makes them much harder to use than they should be, particularly when handling heterogeneous or unstructured data. In this research Scientific Computing Associates Inc. seeks to develop suitable compiler technology to handle many of the details of message-passing systems automatically, while still preserving the ability of sophisticated users to control the low-level details when that is required. They propose to investigate language-level front-end systems that will, among other things: offer much cleaner syntax; handle many general situations automatically; provide semantic support for compile-time or link-time error checking; and reduce the amount of detailed understanding required from the user.
