The diffusion of parallel architectures is currently limited by the la
ck of tools to exploit efficiently all available resources with few pr
ogramming efforts. This is specially a problem in the allocation area.
The paper presents a set of allocation tools (ACL) implemented within
an object-oriented parallel programming environment. ACL defines a se
t of directives that permit users to specify the allocation needs of h
is/her applications without any knowledge of the architecture details.
ACL directives drive the run-time support by tuning its general-purpo
se behaviour to the specific allocation needs of the applications. The
effectiveness of the ACL approach is confirmed by testbed application
s. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.