Pillar: A Parallel Implementation Language

Abstract. As parallelism in microprocessors becomes mainstream, new programming languages and environments are emerging to meet the challenges of parallel programming. To support research on these languages, we are developing a lowlevel language infrastructure called Pillar (derived from Parallel Implementation Language). Although Pillar programs are intended to be automatically generated from source programs in each parallel language, Pillar programs can also be written by expert programmers. The language is defined as a small set of extensions to C. As a result, Pillar is familiar to C programmers, but more importantly, it is practical to reuse an existing optimizing compiler like gcc [1] or Open64 [2] to implement a Pillar compiler. Pillar’s concurrency features include constructs for threading, synchronization, and explicit data-parallel operations. The threading constructs focus on creating new threads only when hardware resources are idle, and otherwise executing parallel work...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: LCPC
• Authors: Todd Anderson, Neal Glew, Peng Guo, Brian T. Lewis, Wei Liu, Zhanglin Liu, Leaf Petersen, Mohan Rajagopalan, James M. Stichnoth, Gansha Wu, Dan Zhang
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, Infrastructure Called Pillar, LCPC 2007, Pillar Programs, Pillar’s Concurrency Features