ABCL/onEM-4: a new software/hardware architecture for object-oriented concurrent computing on an extended dataflow supercomputer

ABSTRACT

The trend towards object-oriented software construction is becoming more and more prevalent, and parallel programming cannot be an exception. In the context of parallel computation, it is often natural to model the computation as message passing between autonomous, concurrently active objects. The problem was, as some previous studies had indicated, that the overhead from message reception to dynamic method dispatching consumes a significant amount of execution time (e.g., as much as 4000 machine cycles or 500 μseconds at 8 MHz block for some language/hardware combination). Our ABCL/onEM-4, a software/hardware implementation architecture for a concurrent object-oriented language, overcomes this problem with technologies such as address-specifiable reactive packet-driven architecture, zero-overhead context switching, and packet-driven allocation of message boxes. Preliminary performance measurements on a real hardware EM-4 confirm our claim, achieving the performance of up to nearly 10 μseconds (130 clocks) total for a remote object-creation followed by a request message send to the created object and a reply reception from the object, for a 12.5 MHz clock speed. Our results indicate that the concurrent object-oriented computational model and languages are highly viable with proper implementational software/hardware architectures.

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Index Terms

• Computer systems organization

  • Architectures

    • Distributed architectures

      • Grid computing

    • Other architectures

      • Data flow architectures

    • Parallel architectures

      • Multicore architectures

    • Serial architectures

      • Superscalar architectures

• Computing methodologies

  • Modeling and simulation

    • Simulation types and techniques

      • Massively parallel and high-performance simulations

  • Parallel computing methodologies

    • Parallel programming languages

• Software and its engineering

  • Software notations and tools

    • General programming languages

      • Language types

        • Object oriented languages

        • Parallel programming languages

  • Software organization and properties

    • Software system structures

      • Distributed systems organizing principles

        • Grid computing