Tulip: a portable run-time system for object-parallel systems

This paper describes Tulip, a parallel run-time system used by the pC++ parallel programming language. Tulip has been implemented on a variety of scalable, MPP computers including the IBM SP2, Intel Paragon, HP/Convex SPP, Meiko CS2, SGI Power Challenge, and Cray T3D. Tulip differs from other data-parallel RTS implementations; it is designed to support the operations from object-parallel programming that require remote member function execution and load and store operations on remote objects. It is designed to provide the thinnest possible layer atop the vendor-supplied machine interface. That thin veneer can then be used by other run-time layers to build machine-independent class libraries, compiler back ends, and more sophisticated run-time support. Some preliminary performance measurements for the IBM SP2, SGI Power Challenge, and Cray T3D are given