Parset: A language construct for system independent parallel programming on distributed systems

Abstract

Parallel programming on loosely coupled distributed systems involves many system dependent tasks such as sensing node availability, creating remote processes, programming inter-process communication and synchronization, etc. Very often these system-dependent tasks are handled at the programmer level. This has complicated the process of parallel programming on distributed systems. The portability of these programs is also severely affected. The programmer may also start his remote processes on heavily loaded nodes, thereby degrading the overall performance of the system. To overcome these difficulties, we introduce a language construct called parset at the programming level. Parset captures various kinds of coarse grain parallelism occurring in distributed systems. It also provides scalability to distributed programs. We show that this construct greatly simplifies writing programs on distributed systems providing transparency to various system dependent tasks.