Gardens: High Performance Objects, Tasking and Migration for Cluster Computing

Gardens is an integrated programming language and system which supports efficient parallel computation across workstation clusters. In particular it addresses the three goals of: high performance, adaptive parallelism and abstraction. High performance is the goal of parallel computing, and abstraction simplifies programming. Adaptive parallelism entails a program adapting during its execution to utilise a changing set of otherwise idle workstations. Tasks are used as units of work, and task migration to realise adaptive parallelism. Tasking is non-preemptive; compared to preemptive tasking this leads to simpler programming and greater efficiency. Global objects are used for inter-task communication. These support abstraction and importantly directly map to active messages: a very efficient messaging system. These features of Gardens are tightly integrated yet orthogonal. 1 Introduction Gardens is an integrated programming language and system which supports efficient parallel computing..