Title:  OS Support for Portable Bulk Synchronous Parallel Programs
Author: Abdelsalam Heddaya and Amr F. Fahmy (Harvard)
Date: December 5, 1994

Abstract:

For parallel programs to become portable, they must be executable with
uniform efficiency on a variety of hardware platforms, which is not
the case at present.  In 1990, Valiant proposed Bulk-Synchronous
Parallelism (BSP) as a model on which portable parallel programs can
be built.  We argue that shared-memory BSP is efficiently
implementable on a wide variety of parallel hardware, and that BSP
forms a useful basis for providing an even higher level programming
interface based on Sequential Consistency (SC).  A list of memory and
thread management features needed to support BSP and SC parallel
programs are given, under the assumption that the parallel computer is
space-shared among multiple parallel task, rather than time-shared.
Known techniques to realize efficiently the most important of these
features are sketched.