A Methodology for the Development and the Support of Massively Parallel Programs

The most important features that a parallel programming language should provide are portability, modularity, and easy usability, as well as performance and efficiency. Current parallel languages are only characterized by some of these features. For instance, most of these languages allow programmers to efficiently exploit the massively parallel target machine. Unfortunately, the estimation of the performance of each application is usually made by the programmer, without the support of any tool. Moreover, the programs produced by using such languages are not portable and easily modifiable. Here, we present a methodology to easily write efficient, high performance and portable massively parallel programs. The methodology is based on the definition of a new explicitly parallel programming language, namely P 3 L, and of a set of compiling tools that perform automatic adaptation of the program features to the target architecture hardware. Target architectures taken into account here are g..