Exploitation of APL Data Parallelism on a Shared-memory MIMD Machine

Abstract

Programs written m APL implicitly contain data parallelism because the high level APL primitives denoting array o erations may be executed in parallel.Our experiment $ APL/C compiler translates ordinary APL programs into the C language with additional parallel constmcts for synchronization support.We target the RP3, a shared-memory MIMD machine built at IBM T.J. WatsonResearch Center, running the Mach operating system.The compiler uses Mach kernel prirmtives to build a parallel run-time environment to reduce the run-time overhead.We have developed a novel method for dynamically determining the required number of processors for a primitive function.The compiler can further apply a form of the loop fusion technique to groups of scalar primitive functions to gain additional improvement.