Athapascan

Athapascan is an high level application programming interface.
Get here a postscript file with a short presentation in french (40 Kb).

Athapascan is a high level data-flow language, 100% C and C++ compatible, with explicit parallelism and enabling various scheduling strategies.
It is based on KAAPI
Availability and download: please read KAAPI web pages.

• Key Features:

The C++ library
Multiple runtime implementation specialized for SMP machine and cluster computing
Portability: inherited from KAAPI

• High level:

• Easy to use:

Implicit communication: global memory space
Shared <int> a;
Explicit parallelism: by asynchronous remote procedure call on C++ function object
TASK f ( Shared<int> x ) { .. } task formal prototype and body declaration
Fork<f>()(a) ; asynchronous task call with a as effective parameter
Implicit synchronisation: consistency on access to the global memory defined by lexical ordering (`;')
Shared<int> x;
Fork<update>()(a);/* ...; x.Write(7); ... */
... ;
Fork<print>()(a) ; /* ...; printf("%d", x.Read()+2; ... */
prints 9 on output (execution of print(a) is delayed until update(a) resumes)
No reference to the execution support in the language: the semantic of the program is independent from the scheduling Fork f(x): default implicit scheduling
Enabling various scheduling such Scotch partitioning, LPTF, or other developed by the user !
Possibility to customize the scheduling strategy by code annotation :
Fork<f>(SetCost(cost))(x)

• Based on theoretical foundations :

Allows a program cost analysis : sequential and parallel time, communication cost and sequential memory space
Existence of scheduling algorithms, proved alpha-competitive for a well-defined class of programs
Selected publications