The Portable Runtime Systems (PORTS) is a consortium of research universities, national laboratories, and computer vendors interested in advancing research for software systems that at run time provide support to compilers and tools for current and next generation supercomputers. Specific goals of the group are: (i) to provide a forum for exchange of information on various aspects related to parallel and distributed computing, (ii) to promote the development of standard applications programming interfaces (APIs) in multithreading, communication, dynamic resource management, and performance measurement that will be used as a compiler target for various task-parallel and data-parallel languages, (iii) to provide support for interoperability across parallel languages and problem solving environments, and (iv) to encourage the development of a community code repository that results from this consortium's activities. In the next 12 months this group plans to focus on three major classes of communication primitives: (i) get/put for point-to-point communication (ii) remote service request for control, and (iii) reduction operations on "ropes" for collective communication on groups of threads. The product of this effort will be the definition and document of APIs for very efficient communication and control operations to be used for the development of run-time support systems for parallel compilers and parallel tools.
