This research concerns the performance of parallel systems, and in particular of homogeneous shared-memory multiprocessors. These systems are just now becoming available, show promise of proividing cost- effective high-performance computing for the near-term future, and present a wide range of unsolved problems, many of which apply to other system architectures as well. They will study three specific areas. The first is the influence of software structure on system performance; we will explore the sources of degradation in parallel systems and the relationships among these sources of degradation, providing guidelines for the construction of parallel software that performs well. The second is software control policies for parallel systems; they will develop and evaluate techniques that yield both good program speedup and good system efficiency. The third is performance tools on and for parallel systems; They will build performance debugging tools for parallel programs, and performance modelling tools that address the problems of parallel systems and that exploit parallelism themselves.
