Practical PRAM Programming

by Jörg Keller, Christoph W. Kessler, Jesper L. Träff

Wiley, New York, 2001.
Wiley Interscience Series on Parallel and Distributed Computing, edited by Albert Zomaya.
596 pages.
ISBN 0-471-35351-5.

Contents

Project homepages

Errata

Slide material

Supplementary material

This page was last updated Sep 30, 2009 - Christoph W. Kessler

Contents

This book deals with the theory, emulation, implementation, programming, and application of synchronous MIMD computers with shared memory, which are also known as PRAMs (parallel random access machines) in theoretical computer science. The book introduces the PRAM model and basic PRAM theory, discusses PRAM emulation approaches, gives a complete reference to the SB-PRAM system architecture, and describes the Fork language design and implementation. It explains how to write structured parallel programs with Fork for many different parallel algorithmic paradigms and programming techniques, surveys the implementation of fundamental PRAM algorithms in the PAD library, and concludes with a parallel application written in Fork from the field of visualization and computational geometry.

The accompanying software packages, a fast PRAM simulator, system software, Fork compiler, libraries, and visualization tool, provide a practical access to the theory of parallel algorithms and a unique platform for experimenting with parallel programming constructs. The software is free and intended for use in programming projects and lab exercises in courses on the foundations of parallel programming and parallel algorithms as well as a tool for research on parallel algorithms.

Here is the table of contents from the final manuscript.

Project homepages

• SB-PRAM, a massively parallel realization of a Combine-CRCW PRAM in hardware; a prototype with 2048 PRAM processors has been built at Saabrücken in 2001.
• Fork programming language for PRAMs, programming environment for the SB-PRAM, with system software package and additional software libraries for asynchronous parallel data structures and skeleton functions
• PAD library of PRAM data structures and algorithms, written in Fork
• FView application

Errata

Click here to get the current list of errata.

Slide material

• Lesson on the Fork language: Slides 2x2 (postscript) (PDF)

  (Source files are available on request.)

Supplementary material

• Course homepage of FDA125 Advanced Parallel Programming
  Graduate course at IDA, Linköpings Universitet, spring 2003
• SIGCSE'04 paper on using Fork and the PRAM simulator in a graduate course on parallel algorithms.
  Presentation slides (PDF)