Parallel Computing Runtime for Microsoft.NET Framework

The.NET Framework offers comprehensive and flexible thread APIs that allow the efficient implementation of multithreaded applications. These APIs can, however, only be utilized within Symmetric Multiprocessors (SMPs), which have a very limited scalability. For larger systems, which are in the PC world mostly represented as clusters of SMPs, other paradigms like message passing or handcrafted hybrid systems have to be used. These approaches are generally more difficult to program and require major code changes compared to sequential codes. This paper presents an extension to the.NET Framework, which implements the concept of automatic dynamic parallelization of programs. The extension provides both ease-of-use and scalability in development of parallel programs. This drastically eases the use of clusters and opens cluster architectures to a whole range of new potential users and applications. The extension offers a new model of a computation process based on the following concepts: • It uses functional programming paradigm, which perfectly fits for parallel computations. A program is a set of functions. Each function can have several inputs and outputs. • Functions body can be implemented using imperative programming style. The only constraint is that a function must not have any side effects