HPARC: A Mixed Shared Memory and Message Passing Programming Style for Heterogeneous Local Area Networks

We consider the problem of parallel programming in heterogeneous local area networks which connect segments of workstations and parallel machines (either message-passing or shared memory) using a variety of communication media. There are two possible ways to transform such a network into a single parallel machine. Implementing a global shared address space using DSM (distributed shared memory) techniques, or to use message passing environment. However, while efficient global DSM over a large size network is practically impossible, message-passing is too low level to handle the complexity of parallel programming in such heterogeneous networks. We choose a new outlook in which a mixed model of shared memory and message passing allows separate implementations of DSM on some of the network's segments. As a result, the network supports global message passing and separate small shared memory address spaces. The problem of how to write parallel programs that exploit such a mixed model is addr..