Porta-SIMD: An Optimally Portable SIMD Programming Language
Abstract
An optimally portable language for a set of architectures must accommodate all the features found in the members of that sat. There was no suitable taxonomy to identify the features of SIMD (Single-Instruction stream, Multiple-Data stream) architectures. Therefore, the taxonomy created and used in the design of Porta-SIMD is presented. Porta-SIMD is an optimally portable, full-featured, SIMD language. It provides dynamic allocation of parallel data with dynamically determined size. Generic subroutines which operate on any size of data may also be written in Porta-SIMD. Some important commercial SIMD languages do not provide these features. A prototype implementation of Porta- SIMD has been developed as a set of include files and libraries used with an ordinary C++ compiler. This approach has allowed more rapid prototyping and language experimentation than a custom compiler would have, but modestly constrained the language's syntax. The result is a very portable but only moderately efficient implementation. Porta-SIMA has been implemented for the Connection Machine 2, for Pixel-Planes 4 and 5, and for ordinary sequential machines. Optimal portability is an important new concept for developing portable languages which can handle architectural diversity. Porta-SIMA demonstrates its usefulness with SIMD computers.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- May 01, 1990
- Accession Number
- ADA228676
Entities
People
- Russell R. Tuck Iii
Organizations
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill