COMPILING FOR DISTRIBUTED-MEMORY SYSTEMS

Distributed-memory systems are potentially scalable to a very large nu mber of processors and promise to be powerful tools for solving large- scale scientific and engineering problems. However, these machines are currently difficult to program, since the user has to distribute the data across the processors and explicitly formulate the communication required by the program under the selected distribution. During the pa st years, language extensions of standard programming languages such a s Fortran were developed that allow a concise formulation of data dist ribution, and new compilation methods were designed and implemented th at allow the programming of such machines at this relatively high leve l. In this paper, we describe the current state of the art in compilin g procedural languages (in particular, Fortran) for distributed-memory machines, analyze the limitations of these approaches, and outline fu ture research.