THE IMPLEMENTATION OF BALINDA PASCAL ON A MULTITHREADING SYSTEM

Abstract

This thesis centers around implementation of BaLinda Pascal on SUN SPARC-server 1000, a multithread-based system. As part of the BIDDLE project, BaLinda Pascal is conceived by retrofitting a subset of original Pascal. Six construct key words are added to make BaLinda Pascal an annotation parallel programming language in which parallelism is expressed explicitly, EXEC, ENDOFTASK, and SYNCHRONIZE are introduced for task generation and synchronization, while IN, OUT and RD are three tuplespace operations added for inter-task communication. Tuplespace, a shared collection of logical tuples, plays an important role in data exchange and task synchronization. BaLinda Pascal compiler is built with the help of Lex and Yacc. The output of the compiler is Solaris threaded C code and the final binaries are obtained by compiling threaded C code using SUN’s native C compiler and linking with tuplespace library. Multithread-based implementation of BaLinda Pascal is machine independent. The BaLinda Pascal program examples and performance data shown in this thesis demonstrate: • BaLinda Pascal provides effective and easy-to-use mechanisms for task controls and synchronization. • The language extensions of BaLinda Pascal provide programmers a clear and safe interface to parallel code. • It is easy to learn BaLinda Pascal because of its Pascal-based nature. • BaLinda Pascal is appropriate for applications of coarse-grained or medium-grained parallelism.