Chapter 7. Programming Shared Address Space Platforms

Explicit parallel programming requires specification of parallel tasks along with their interactions. These interactions may be in the form of synchronization between concurrent tasks or communication of intermediate results. In shared address space architectures, communication is implicitly specified since some (or all) of the memory is accessible to all the processors. Consequently, programming paradigms for shared address space machines focus on constructs for expressing concurrency and synchronization along with techniques for minimizing associated overheads. In this chapter, we discuss shared-address-space programming paradigms along with their performance issues and related extensions to directive-based paradigms.

Shared address space programming paradigms can vary on mechanisms for data sharing, concurrency models, and support for synchronization. Process based models assume that all data associated with a process is private, by default, unless otherwise specified (using UNIX system calls such as shmget and shmat). While this is important for ensuring protection in multiuser systems, it is not necessary when multiple concurrent aggregates are cooperating to solve the same problem. The overheads associated with enforcing protection domains make processes less suitable for parallel programming. In contrast, lightweight processes and threads assume that all memory is global. By relaxing the protection domain, lightweight processes and threads support much faster manipulation. As a result, this is the preferred model for parallel programming and forms the focus of this chapter. Directive based programming models extend the threaded model by facilitating creation and synchronization of threads. In this chapter, we study various aspects of programming using threads and parallel directives.