The hydra parallel programming system

Abstract

The Hydra Parallel Programming System, a new parallel language extension to Java, and its supporting software are described. It is a fairly simple yet powerful language designed to address a number of areas that have not received much attention. One of these areas is the recompilation of parallel programs at runtime to allow a parallel program to adapt to the architecture it is executing on. The first version of this software system focuses on smaller Symmetric Multiprocessing and compatible architectures which are becoming more common. This particular class of machines has a great need for more options in the area of parallel programming among the vastly popular Java language programmers. Hydra programs will run as sequential Java on machines that do not have the parallel support or do not have an implemented Hydra runtime system without requirement of any modifications to the program. This paper describes the language, compares it with other languages (specifically with JOMP, an OpenMP implementation for Java), presents a brief discussion on compiling and executing Hydra programs, presents some sample benchmarks and their performance on three platforms, and concludes with a discussion of issues and future directions for Hydra. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.