The HPspmd Programming Model

The major goal of the system we are building is to provide a programming model that is a flexible hybrid of HPF-like data-parallel language features and the popular, library-oriented, SPMD style, omitting some basic assumptions of the HPF model. We refer to this model as the HPspmd programming model. The HPspmd programming model adds a small set of syntax extensions to a base language, which in principle might be (say) Java, Fortran, or C++. The syntax extensions add distributed arrays as language primitives, and a few new control constructs such as on, overall, and at. Moreover, it is necessary to provide bindings from the extended language to various communication and parallel computation libraries.