Models and Languages for Parallel Computation

We survey parallel programming models and languages using six criteria to assess their suitability for realistic portable parallel programming. We argue that an ideal model should be easy to program, should have a software development methodology, should be architecture-independent, should be easy to understand, should be efficiently implementable, and should provide accurate information about the cost of programs. These criteria reflect our belief that developments in parallelism must be driven by a parallel software industry based on portability and efficiency. We consider programming models in six categories, depending on the level of abstraction they provide. Those that are very abstract conceal even the presence of parallelism at the software level. Such models make software easy to build and port, but efficiency is usually hard to achieve. At the other end of the spectrum, low-level models make all of the messy issues of parallel programming explicit (how many threads, h..