A common library interface to shared-memory multiprocessors

In writing a highly-portable parallel program, we developed a library of parallel primitives to shield our application code from the various multiprocessors. Rather than adapt the different multiprocessors to a program-specific library via extensive implementation, we chose to first find a common ´intersection´ of the virtual machine models provided by each vendor, define a common interface to that model, and then develop our application based on that model. This paper describes the resulting common virtual machine model and a library interface to that model. We have implementations for that model on seven different shared-memory multiprocessors, and two different uniprocessors. Each implementation averages less than 100 lines of code. The common virtual machine model requires more programming effort than any one vendor´s library, but the resulting program executes reasonably efficiently on all machines.<>