P3M: A Virtual Machine Approach to Massively Parallel Computing

While technology improvements in VLSI favor the building of massively parallel computers, the key obstacle to the widespread adoption of such computers is the lack of a methodology for developing software that achieves both portability and high performance. This paper presents a virtual machine intended to serve as the cornerstone of such a methodology. The PM virtual machine can be mapped efficiently to different physical machines and enables the development of software tools and applications that can be ported across different parallel machines.