Compiling for Distributed-Memory Systems

Distributed-memop systems are potentiall) scalable to a very large number of processors and promise to be povcvrjiul tools, for solving large-scale scientijc and engineering problems. Howwever. these machines are currently dificult to program, sirice the user has to distribute the data across the processors atid explicitly formulate the communication required by the program under the selected distribution. During the past years. language extensions oj standard programming languages such as Fortrari were rlei~eloped that allow a concise formulation of data distribution. and new compilation methods were designed and impletnetired that allow the programming of such machines at this relatively high level. In this paper, we describe the current stare of the art in compiling procedural languages (in particular, Fortrun) for distrubed-memory machines, analyze the limitations of these approuches. tirid outline future research.