The Fork95 Parallel Programming Language: Design, Implementation, Application

Fork95 is an imperative parallel programming language intended to express algorithms for synchronous shared memory machines (PRAMs). It is based on ANSI C and offers additional constructs to hierarchically divide processor groups into subgroups and manage 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 supports locally asynchronous computation where desired by the programmer. We present a one--pass compiler, fcc, which compiles Fork95 and C programs to the SBPRAM machine. The SB-PRAM is a lock--step synchronous, massively parallel multiprocessor currently being built at Saarbrucken University, with a physically shared memory and uniform memory access time. We examine three important types of parallel computation frequently used for the parallel solution of real--world problems. While farming and parallel divide--and--conquer are directly supported by Fork95 language constructs, pipelining can be easily expressed using existing language features; an additional language construct for pipelining is not required