A theoretical framework of data parallelism and its operational semantics

Abstract. We developed a theory in order to address crucial questions of program design methodology. We think that it could unify two concepts of data parallel programming that we consider fundamental as they concern data locality expression: the notions of alignment in HPF and shape in C*. In this article, we aim at exploring the impact of program transformations on efficiency. For this, we define a formal operational semantics associated with the aforementioned theory

A Theoretical Framework of Data Parallelism and its Operational Semantics

. We developed a theory in order to address crucial questions of program design methodology. We think that it could unify two concepts of data parallel programming that we consider fundamental as they concern data locality expression: the notions of alignment in HPF and shape in C . In this article, we aim at exploring the impact of program transformations on eciency. For this, we dene a formal operational semantics associated with the aforementioned theory. 1 Introduction The interest of the concepts that lie behind any programming language is that they express the relationship between what the programmer knows about the problem he wants to address and what the compiler knowns about the architecture on which the program will execute. These concepts consist then in an abstract knowledge that the programmer and the compiler share and can use to interact and eventually perform the best implementation. This is even more true when the architecture is a parallel one, when both..