Portable Run-Time Support for Dynamic Object-Oriented Parallel Processing

Mentat is an object-oriented parallel processing system designed to simplify the task of writing portable parallel programs for parallel machines and workstation networks. The Mentat compiler and run-time system work together to automatically manage the communication and synchronization between objects. The run-time system marshalls member function arguments, schedules objects on processors, and dynamically constructs and executes large-grain data dependence graphs. In this article we present the Mentat run-time system. We focus on three aspects - the software architecture, including the interface to the compiler and the structure and interaction of the principle components of the run-time system; the run-time overhead on a component-by-component basis for two platforms, a Sun SparcStation 2 and an Intel Paragon; and an analysis of the minimum granularity required for application programs to overcome the run-time overhead.