Exploitation of APL data parallelism on a shared-memory MIMD machine

Abstract

Programs written m APL implicitly contain data parallelism because the high level APL primitives denoting array o erations may be executed in parallel. Our experiment $ APL/C compiler translates ordinary APL programs into the C language with additional parallel constmcts for synchronization support. We target the RP3, a shared-memory MIMD machine built at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, running the Mach operating system. The compiler uses Mach kernel prirmtives to build a parallel run-time environment to reduce the run-time overhead.