A data parallel C and its platforms

dbC is a data parallel extension to ANSI C similar to Thinking Machines C* and MasPar MPL. To facilitate bit-oriented computation, dbC supports computation with arbitrary precision integer data, bit string extraction and insertion, and function parameters with dynamic bit length. In this paper, we describe dbC and its mapping to three very different architectures: (1) Terasys, an experimental SIMD machine which associates a single-bit processor with a column of SRAM memory; (2) Splash-2, a reconfigurable logic array of Xilinx Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) that operates as a parallel co-processor; and (3) clusters of Condor-controlled workstations communicating via the MNFS distributed shared memory