Safe Sharing of Objects in a High-Performance Parallel Language (zipped postscript),
Benedict Gomes, Welf Löwe, Jürgen W. Quittek, Boris Weissman
submitted to the 12th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 98)

Consistency of objects in a concurrent computing environment is usually ensured by serializing all incoming method calls. However, for high performance parallel computing intra-object parallelism, i.e. concurrent execution of methods on an object, is desirable. Currently, languages supporting intra-object parallelism a re based on object models that leave it to the programmer to ensure consistency. We present the object model for Sather-2, that ensures object consistency while supporting intra-object concurrency thereby offering both safety and efficiency. The description starts with a simple and safe, but inefficient model and gradua lly increases the sophistication by introducing features for expressiveness and greater efficiency while maintaining safety. A prototype implementation of Sather-2 is presented, along with an evaluation of the performance on a particle simulation. A discussion of the implementation an d run-time measurements confirm the achieved efficiency, while code examples dem onstrate the ease of expression.


Last change: 12/2/97
The Sather Team (sather@icsi.berkeley.edu)