The objectives of this research are to design and implement a preliminary version of a parallel programming language that will: (1) include efficient implementations of general purpose constructs for both shared and distributed memory parallel programming; (2) be capable of increasing the execution speed of applications by at least two orders-of-magnitude; (3) run on a comprehensive set of processors; (4) adhere to existing standards as closely as possible; (5) be easy to use and understand; and (6) require minimal recoding of existing algorithms and libraries. The strategy for this project is based on extending an existing general purpose parallel programming language which already supports shared memory parallelism. The language, Top Level Common Lisp (TopCL), will be extended by adding constructs supporting distributed memory parallelism. By extending TopCL's existing support of parallel programming to include distributed memory parallelism (the "node" level), a single application will be capable of exploiting the computational resources of entire networks of conventional computers, including shared memory multiprocessors. As a result, software developers will be able to achieve supercomputer performance with networks of lowcost hardware. Furthermore, TopCL currently satisfies many of the stated objectives. Leveraging upon the existing system will minimize the costs and risks of this project and at the same time maximize the potential for success.The potential commercial application as described by the awardee: Successful completion of this research could ultimately lead to a product which is a general purpose programming tool for the development of numerous high-performance distributed applications which more efficiently utilize large networks of existing computing resources.
