Near or Far (zipped postscript, inlined gifs)
Hermann Härtig
ICSI Techreport TR-94-004

To efficiently program massively parallel computers it is important to be aware of nearness and farness of references. It can be a severe performance bug if a reference that is meant to be near by a programmer turns out to be far. This paper presents a simple way to express nearness and farness in such a way that compile-time detection of such performance bugs becomes possible. It also allows for compile-time determination of nearness for many cases which can be used for compile-time optimization techniques to overlap communication with processing. The method relies on the type system of a strongly typed object oriented language whose type rules are extended by three type coercion rules.


Last change: 5/30/96
The Sather Team (sather@icsi.berkeley.edu)