An open enviornment for building parallel programming systems

Abstract

PRESTO is a set of tools for building parallel programming systems on shared-memory multiprocessors. PRESTO's goal is to provide a framework within which one can easily build efficient support for any of a wide variety of “models” of parallel programming. PRESTO is designed for easy modification and extension, not only at the level of the primitives and structures made available for the application programmer's use, but also at the level of the run-time kernel that supports parallel applications. PRESTO is implemented in the object-oriented language C++ on a Sequent Balance 21000 and has been used in a number of applications that are described in this paper.