CS140 Assignment 1: Research a Parallel Language

Due January 13, 2008

Problem

Ever since the first parallel computers were built in the 1980s, people have invented new programming languages (and extensions of old programming languages) for them. There's a whole alphabet soup of parallel languages, including: BSP (for "bulk synchronous parallel"), Co-Array Fortran, Cuda, HPF (for "high-performance Fortran"), NESL, Pmatlab, StarLisp, Star-P, Titanium, UPC (for "universal parallel C"), and many others. Some of these are in wide use, some are just research projects, and some died long ago.

Your assignment is to choose one of these languages, find some information about it, and write a short report (about one full page) about it. In your report, try to answer as many of the following questions as you can:

• Describe the language briefly--is it based on a sequential language like C or Fortran? How in general does it work?
• When was the language developed? Can you find out who developed it?
• Was it designed for a specific kind of parallel machine? What kind?
• Has it been used for large scientific computations?
• As far as you can tell, is it being used today?
• Is it free? If not, who sells it? (Or is it not available at all now?)
• Give references to a couple of papers or web sites.

You can research any of the languages on the list above, or any other parallel language that you want, except don't choose MPI, OpenMP, or Pthreads (because they're described in detail in the textbook), and don't choose Cilk or Cilk++ (because we'll be learning about them in detail in class).

I'll put some or all of the reports up on the course web site, for our very own CS 140 survey of parallel languages.

Submission

This homework is due on Tuesday, January 13 (by 11:59 pm). Submit it on CSIL using the "turnin" command, something like