Object-oriented Ease-based parallel primitives in C++

Abstract

The paper presents our language C++-with-Ease, a superset of C++ with primitives for process creation and communication. The work adopts the semantics of the Ease parallel primitives, as defined by S.E. Zenith (1990), within the object oriented paradigm. The result is a general purpose, high level, imperative parallel programming language that allows the simple expression of parallel algorithms within a type-safe implementation. Our language implementation is best suited to homogeneous parallel MIMD machines, independent of architecture, but also runs under threads packages. C++-with-Ease addresses efficiency for message copying and provides extensions to allow the passing of arbitrary messages in a natural fashion within the paradigm. The implementation and associated message protocols are discussed.