General purpose massively parallel systems: the role of programming environments

One of the key obstacles to the widespread adoption of massively parallel computers is the lack of programming environments to support the development of software that can achieve both portability and high performance. The paper discusses alternative methodologies to define static and dynamic tools of this environment. While the main problems posed by a static tool are input dependant behaviour and the definition of a formal and abstract representation of the user program, dynamic tools introduce overhead to collect data about the program behaviour to drive their policy. Proper integration between the two kinds of tools is fundamental to be able to select the most appropriate solution for a given program. The definition and the design of these tools can be largely simplified through the introduction of a virtual machine to be mapped onto different physical machines and that enables the development of software tools and applications that can be ported across different machines