On the Coexistence of Shared-Memory and Message-Passing in the Programming of Parallel Applications

. Interoperability in non-sequential applications requires communication to exchange information using either the shared-memory or message-passing paradigm. In the past, the communication paradigm in use was determined through the architecture of the underlying computing platform. Shared-memory computing systems were programmed to use shared-memory communication, whereas distributed-memory architectures were running applications communicating via message-passing. Current trends in the architecture of parallel machines are based on shared-memory and distributed-memory. For scalable parallel applications, in order to maintain transparency and efficiency, both communication paradigms have to coexist. Users should not be obliged to know when to use which of the two paradigms. On the other hand, the user should be able to exploit either of the paradigms directly in order to achieve the best possible solution. The paper presents the VOTE communication support system. VOTE provides coexistent..