Re: Compilers for parallel computing

In article 91-05-095 you write:
>[suggestions wanted on these and other books]
>
>Gelernter and Nicolau: Languages and compilers for parallel computing (Pitman)
>
>Polychronopoulos: Parallel programming and compilers (Kluwer Academic)
>
>Wolfe: Optimizing supercompilers for supercomputers (Pitman)
>
>Zima and Chapman: Supercompilers for parallel and vector computers (Addison
>Wesley)


The Wolfe book is a reprint of his PhD thesis (if I'm not mistaken - I've
read his thesis, but have only seen the book in bookstores). Anyway, it's a
good book, but more of an overview of the subject, basically, here's what
dependence analysis is, and here's how you use it, and here's a bunch of
things you can do with it. I think it's definitely worth the time to read.
I've browsed through the Polychronopoulos book, and it looked good, but I
couldn't tell you anything more about it. Another good book to look at
along these lines is:


Utpal Bannerjee: Dependence Analysis for Supercomputing (Kluwer Academic)


This book has a very thorough treatment of dependence analysis, but not much
else (doesn't tell you what good it does, only what it is). It tries to be
a theoretical foundation for the study of dependence analysis and its use it
various areas (such as parallelizing compilers). Probably read this book
after Wolfe's.


>Can anybody recommend one of these, or any other? ...


I don't know of any good books on other approaches to parallelism, such as
functional/data flow programming (not completely the same thing, but...). I
have heard of one book on the subject, however:


Boleslaw Szymanski: Parallel Functional Programming Languages and
Compilers (ACM)


I personally would like to read it sometime, but I don't know if it has even
been published yet (wasn't out the last time I checked). I guess that's my
list of books, and once you've got that down, there's a lot of information
that lives in articles and tech reports that hasn't made it to books yet.


Dave Sielaff
Cray Research, Inc.
C Compiler Guy
--

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