Class and user based parallelism in Raven

Abstract

This paper presents the concurrency features found in Raven, an object-oriented parallel programming system. Raven supports coarse-grained parallelism via class based and user based parallelism. Class based parallelism is provided by the implementor of the class, while user based parallelism is provided by the user, or client of objects. Raven also supports object properties which are determined at object creation time, thereby eliminating the need for separate class hierarchies that support concurrency. Raven is operational on a variety of machine architectures, including a shared memory multiprocessor. Initial experience indicates that sequential code can easily be transformed into parallel code and that a substantial speedup is possible.<>