Booster: A High-Level Language for Portable Parallel Algorithms†

The development of programming languages suitable to express parallel algorithms in is crucial to the pace of acceptance of parallel processors for production applications. As in sequential programming, portability of parallel software is a strongly desirable feature. Portability in this respect means that given an algorithm description in a parallel programming language, it must be possible, with relatively little effort, to generate efficient code for several classes of (parallel) architectures. In this paper, the language Booster is described. Booster is a high-level, fourth generation, parallel programming language. The language has been designed to program parallel algorithms for a wide variety of target parallel architectures. Booster has a strong separation of concerns, featuring amongst others a clear separation of algorithm description and algorithm decomposition and -representation. Programs written in Booster are translated to imperative languages, such as FORTRAN or C, and can be easily integrated in large applications. Parallelism can be obtained by applying data and/or code decomposition. Once algorithm and decomposition are described the transformation is done automatically.