NHSE Software Catalog

Mentat

url

ftp://uvacs.cs.virginia.edu/pub/mentat/

description

http://uvacs.cs.virginia.edu/~mentat/index.html

abstract

Mentat is an object-oriented parallel processing system designed to
directly address the difficulty of developing architecture-independent
parallel programs.
The fundamental objectives of Mentat are to (1)
provide easy-to-use parallelism, (2) achieve high performance via
parallel execution, and (3) facilitate the execution of applications
across a wide range of platforms. The Mentat approach exploits the
object-oriented paradigm to provide high-level abstractions that
mask the complex aspects of parallel programming, including
communication, synchronization, and scheduling, from the
programmer. The programmer uses application
domain knowledge to specify those object classes that are of sufficient
computational complexity to warrant parallel execution.
Mentat combines a medium-grain, data-driven computation model
with the object-oriented programming paradigm and provides
automatic detection and management of data dependencies.
Because Mentat uses a
data-driven computation model, it is particularly well-suited for
message passing, non-shared memory architectures.
There are two primary aspects of Mentat: the Mentat Programming
Language (MPL) and the Mentat run-time system.

keywords

parallel programming language; parallel runtime system;
dependency analysis; architecture dependence

contact

mentat@virginia.edu