Fork95 Language and Compiler for the SB-PRAM

The SB-PRAM is a lock-step-synchronous, massively parallel multiprocessor currently being built at Saarbrucken University, with up to 4096 RISC-style processing elements and with a (from the programmer's view) physically shared memory of up to 2GByte with uniform memory access time. Because of its architectural properties, the SB-PRAM is particularly suitable for the implementation of irregular numerical computations, non-numerical algorithms, and database applications. Fork95 is a redesign of the PRAM language FORK. Fork95 is based on ANSI C and offers additional constructs to create parallel processes, hierarchically dividing processor groups into subgroups, managing shared and private address subspaces. Fork95 makes the assembly-level synchronicity of the underlying hardware available to the programmer at the language level. Nevertheless, it provides also comfortable facilities for locally asynchronous computation where desired by the programmer. Altogether, Fork95 offers full expressibilit