NHSE Software Catalog

CHARM

url

ftp://a.cs.uiuc.edu/pub/CHARM/CHARM.4.3

abstract

CHARM is a machine independent parallel programming system.
Programs written using this system will run unchanged on MIMD
machines with or without a shared memory. It provides high-level
mechanisms and strategies to facilitate the task of developing even
highly complex parallel applications.

Charm programs are written in C with a few syntactic extensions. It is
possible to interface to other languages such as FORTRAN using the
foreign language interface that C provides. Charm++ is the
C++-based parallel object oriented language having all features of
Charm, which supports multiple inheritance, late bindings, and
polymorphism.

Charm features include effficent portability, latency tolerance, and
dynamic load balancing. The system provides support for both
regular and irregular computations.

keywords

parallel programming language; parallel runtime system;
load balancing; architecture independence; performance visualization;
dependence analysis

description

http://charm.cs.uiuc.edu/

contact

Professor L. V. Kale / kale@cs.uiuc.edu

environment

The system currently runs on Intel's iPSC/860, iPSC/2 and Paragon,
Thinking Machines CM-5, nCUBE/2, IBM SP-2, Encore Multimax, Sequent
Symmetry, single-processor UNIX machines, and networks of UNIX
workstations. Planned ports it to the KSR-1, Cray T3D, Convex Exemplar and
other parallel machines as they become available.

comments

Some related tools are available. Projections is a performance
visualization tool, and dagger is a graphical tool which shows
dependencies between messages and sub-computations.