Tempest: A Substrate for Portable Parallel Programs

This paper describes Tempest, a collection of mechanisms for communication and synchronization in parallel programs. With these mechanisms, authors of compilers, libraries, and application programs can exploit—across a wide range of hardware platforms—the best of shared memory, message passing, and hybrid combinations of the two. Because Tempest provides mechanisms, not policies, programmers can tailor communication to a program’s sharing pattern and semantics, rather than restructuring the program to run with the limited communication options offered by existing parallel machines. And since the mechanisms are easily supported on different machines, Tempest provides a portable interface across platforms. This paper describes the Tempest mechanisms, briefly explains how they are used, outlines several implementations on both custom and stock hardware, and presents preliminary performance results that demonstrate the benefits of this approach.