Meta Process Model and its Portable Parallel Programming Interface MpC

This paper proposes a new portable parallel programming interface MpC, Meta process C, for Meta Process Model. The Meta Process Model is a parallel programming padadigm based on a hierarchical shared memory model and an explicit description of parallelism On these points, this model is different from either the strict Shared Memory Model (SMM) or the Message Passing Model (MPM). The Meta Process Model introduces shared data that can be accessed by all processes in one Meta Process and distinguishes process-local and process-shared data explicitly with a hierarchical data scope. A programmer describes process interactions explicitly using shared data accesses and synchronizing operations, such as a barrier and a lock/unlock. So it enables us to write a wide variety of parallel programs, not only SPMD and data parallel applications written in OpenMP and HPF but also asymmetric and asynchronous MPMD applications written in MPI. The Meta Process Model provides us with both flexible parallelism description of the MPM and good program readability/writability of the SMM. Its target machines include clusters as well as shared memory parallel machines. Some execution results of MpC programs on clusters and shared memory machines are shown, and they are compared with OpenMP and UPC programs. It also proves good portability of MpC programs and MpC compilers because they use user-level SDSM library, pthread library and gcc, which are available for various OS’s and architectures. Key Word Programming Model, Parallel Language, Cluster computing, SDSM