Fork95 compiler for SB-PRAM available

We are happy to announce the first release of the Fork95 compiler ^ ^ ^
for a synchronous massively-parallel MIMD machine, the SB-PRAM. | | |
                                                                                                                                        \ | /
Fork95 is a redesign of the FORK language for PRAMs that was \_|_/
originally developed by T.Hagerup, A.Schmitt and H.Seidl at $
Saarbruecken University in 1989. $
FORK is an imperative parallel programming language that supports $
a synchronous dataparallel programming style as well as a recursive $
divide-and-conquer paradigm. $


While the old FORK was based on a subset of Pascal, we have made Fork95
a superset of ANSI-C, offering a much richer set of data types
(including general pointers, shared and private heaps) and control constructs.
We have introduced an asynchronous ("farm") mode to support local computations
and to encapsulate I/O.
Furthermore, we have made the powerful multiprefix instructions of the SB-PRAM
available to the Fork95 programmer as atomic operators.
Due to carefully chosen default settings, existing C sources can be included
into Fork95 programs without any syntactical change.
For efficiency reasons, we have abandoned FORK's overly complicated concept
of the "maximal synchronous hierarchies" of processor groups.
Also, dynamically resizing the set of working processors has been abolished.


Fork95 is available via anonymous ftp from alkoholix.cs.uni-sb.de
in directory /pub/fork95. The distribution (500K) contains


- the Fork95 compiler
    (partially based on lcc1.9 by C.Fraser/D.Hanson at Princeton University)
    including source code, documentation and example programs
- the Fork95 language description
    (Technical Report No. 01/95 of SFB 124, Saarbruecken University, Germany)
- a preliminary version of the SB-PRAM system software:
    assembler, linker, loader.
- the SB-PRAM simulator, which is to be used until the SB-PRAM hardware
    becomes available, hopefully at the end of this year ...


Both the simulator and most of the system software was written by
S. Franziskus and M. Bosch at Saarbruecken University.
The Fork95 compiler was implemented by C. Kessler.
All of this software has been successfully run on our SUN workstations at
Saarbruecken and Trier.


The Fork95 language description is also available on the WWW, the URL is:
http://www-wjp.cs.uni-sb.de/fork95/fork95.html


                                                                                              ,+===============--->
                                                                                          ,//
        #=======================================<<<=================--->
                                                                                          `\\
                                                                                              `+===============--->
        Christoph W. Kessler and Helmut Seidl
        University of Trier, Germany
        email: {kessler,seidl}@ti.uni-trier.de
--

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