TagC: a Language with Computation Distribution Directives for Expressing Parallelism

In this paper, we present TagC, a new language based on C for distributing parallel and/or pipelined computations. TagC simplifies the programming of distributed memory machines by providing the programmer with a global name space and a mechanism for specifying computation distribution. The main advantage of our paradigm is that it provides a unique framework for expressing both functional parallelism and data parallelism. 1 Background Parallel computers are becoming more and more accessible to scientists and programmers. However, they are not likely to be widely accepted until they are easy to program. To obtain the full performance of a distributed-memory parallel machine, the programmer is forced to manually distribute code and data, and manage the resulting communications by explicitly adding send and receive messages. Recently, new high-level programming languages were developped that make use of a global name space to facilitate the writing of programs. In this approach, the cur..