The PRESTO Application Suite

This report describes a group of coarseand medium-grain, explicitly-parallel applications that have been made available via the World-Wide Web at (http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/parsw/Benchmarks/Presto/www/index.html). These programs have been written using the PRESTO user-level threads library [4], by students at the University of Washington and Rice University. PRESTO provides a C ++ -based environment for writing object-oriented parallel programs for shared-memory multiprocessors. The library provides basic classes useful for writing parallel programs, among them are thread manipulation routines for concurrency and synchronization primitives. Details of this programming environment and examples are in the PRESTO user's manual [5]. The PRESTO manual and sources can be obtained via anonymous FTP (ftp://cs.washington.edu/pub/presto1.0.tar.Z). The applications in this suite have been written for the Sequent Symmetry [10] and calls into the PRESTO library port to the Sequent. PRESTO's thread manipulation calls, such as thread creation, deletion, etc., are fairly standard, and are available in thread packages available on other machines. These programs are therefore easily portable to other architectures by replacing the PRESTO threads calls to those of another library. The next section describes each application brie y. The applications from Rice University were developed as part of a class project, and made available here, thanks to Prof. John Bennett. Some of these programs are short and do fairly obvious computations, like matrix multiply. Hence many details are omitted, and explanation is provided only when appropriate.