OBJECT-ORIENTED PARALLEL-PROCESSING WITH MENTAT

Mentat is an object-oriented parallel processing system that addresses three problems endemic to parallel computing, the difficulty of writi ng parallel programs, the difficulty achieving portability of those pr ograms, and the difficulty exploiting contemporary heterogeneous archi tectures. Mentat is a complete parallel application development enviro nment consisting of the Mentat Programming Language (MPL) compiler, a run-time system that supports dynamic data dependence detection, a com plete post mortem debugger, resource management and accounting capabil ities, and various utilities to aid the programmer and system administ rator. This paper provides a basic introduction to the philosophy behi nd Mentat and the MPL, and then focuses on application performance. Th e objective is to give the reader insight into how Mentat performs on different classes of applications. For each of four applications we sk etch the implementation and present performance results.