SAT: A Programming Methodology with Skeletons and Collective Operations

Today, conditions for the development of parallel and distributed systems would appear to be ideal. On the one hand, the demand for such systems is strong and growing steadily. Traditional supercomputing applications, Grand Challenges, require the solution of increasingly large problems, with new areas added recently, e.g. research on the human genome. The rapid growth of the Internet has given rise to geographically distributed, networked supercomputers (Grids) and to new classes of distributed commercial applications with parallelism on both the server and client side. On the other hand, bigger and more powerful systems are being built every year. Microprocessors are rapidly becoming faster and cheaper, enabling more processors to be connected in one system. New networking hardware with smaller latency and greater bandwidth is improving systems’ communication performance. Several levels of parallelism are available to the user: within a processor, among several processors in an SMP or a cluster, as well as parallelism among remote machines cooperating via the Internet.