Portable Run-Time Support for Dynamic Object-Oriented Parallel Processing

The object-oriented paradigm is a powerful tool for managing software complexity. A key question when the paradigm is applied to parallel computing is whether the associated overhead is so large as to defeat the high-performance objectives that motivate parallel computing. We show that high-performance and dynamic object-oriented parallel processing are not mutually exclusive. Our vehicle is Mentat, a portable, object-oriented parallelprocessingsystemdevelopedattheUniversityofVirginia.Wepresentabriefoverview of the Mentat Programming Language, a detailed description of the run-time system that supports the language, and the performance of run-time system primitives on two disparate platforms, a Sun SparcStation 2 and the Intel iPSC/860 Gamma. The results, combined with application results presented elsewhere, lead us to the conclusion that high-performance and dynamic, object-oriented parallel processing are not mutually exclusive. Keywords: object-oriented, parallel processing 1. Int..