Detail

A High-Performance Parallel Computing Environment

The DOLPHIN project aims at designing a programming environment for the simple and efficient exploitation of parallelism on the novel computer architectures based on shared virtual memory.

As a basis for software development, the project will build a low cost scalable parallel platform supporting shared virtual memory. The hardware system will be based on standard components, such as Intel P6
motherboards and ATM networking. A publicly available Operating System, Linux, FreeBSD or Mach, and a shared virtual memory software
support, either TreadMarks or other packages being currently developed
in the research community, will be ported and adapted to the hardware
platform in order to provide low-level programming facilities.
The main contribution of the project will be the high-level parallel
programming environment we plan to develop. The environment will use
object-oriented programming to simplify program development and allow
reuse, whilst guaranteeing efficient execution. The main issues to be addressed will be object allocation and management in
the parallel environment, explicit and implicit thread creation, task scheduling on a machine with different latencies, and the issues on programming language design. The environment will include a graphical parallel visualizer to facilitate performance analysis.

During project development a set of parallel applications on the areas of logic programming, time series analysis and constraint systems will be developed and used in conjunction with the traditional SPLASH benchmark set to validate our ideas.