Flexible Program and Architecture Specification for Massively Parallel Systems

Based on a stepwise software development methodology in this paper a possibility is presented to formally describe the algorithmic details and hardware-characteristics influencing efficient problem solutions for massively parallel systems. Variability at the specification level is introduced by the possibility to express properties and modification rules of the mathematical objects and expressions the algorithm is based on. The underlying details of the (massively parallel) architecture are described in terms of an abstract data type (ADT) along with transformation rules connecting architecture independent descriptions (based on recurrence equations) and target system characteristics. By this means it is also possible to specify special language and library support along with their performance characteristics, thus forming a basis for a performance model of the architecture. A simple example is presented illustrating our approach taking the MasPar SIMD system [Bla90] as ..