The PISCES 2 parallel programming environment

PISCES 2 is a programming environment for scientific and engineering computations on MIMD parallel computers. It is currently implemented on a flexible FLEX/32 at NASA Langley, a 20 processor machine with both shared and local memories. The environment provides an extended Fortran for applications programming, a configuration environment for setting up a run on the parallel machine, and a run-time environment for monitoring and controlling program execution. This paper describes the overall design of the system and its implementation on the FLEX/32. Emphasis is placed on several novel aspects of the design: the use of a carefully defined virtual machine, programmer control of the mapping of virtual machine to actual hardware, forces for medium-granularity parallelism, and windows for parallel distribution of data. Some preliminary measurements of storage use are included

Methods for design and evaluation of integrated hardware/software systems for concurrent computation

Two testbed programming environments to support the evaluation of a large range of parallel architectures have been implemented under the program Parallel Implementation of Scientific Computing Environments (PISCES). The PISCES 1 environment was applied to two areas of aerospace interest: a sparse matrix iterative equation solver and a dynamic scene analysis system. Currently, the NICE/SPAR testbed system for structural analysis is being modified for parallel operation under PISCES 2; the PISCES 1 applications are also being adapted for PISCES 2. A new formal model of concurrent computation has been developed, based on the mathematical system known as H graph semantics together with a timed Petri net model of the parallel aspects of a system

PISCES 2 users manual

PISCES 2 is a programming environment and set of extensions to Fortran 77 for parallel programming. It is intended to provide a basis for writing programs for scientific and engineering applications on parallel computers in a way that is relatively independent of the particular details of the underlying computer architecture. This user's manual provides a complete description of the PISCES 2 system as it is currently implemented on the 20 processor Flexible FLEX/32 at NASA Langley Research Center