The Cedar parallel processor: machine organization and software

Cedar is a shared-memory parallel processor organized into processor clusters. A prototype of this machine is being built at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There are three levels of parallelism in Cedar. The vector and intracluster parallelism are controlled by the hardware, and the intercluster parallelism can be accessed via Xylem, the operating system. Xylem also provides facilities to manually control part of the memory hierarchy. The machine will be programmable in several languages. The first compiler being implemented is an extension of FORTRAN. The Cedar system will also include a variety of programming tools such as parallelizers and debuggers