Collection types for database programming in the BSP model.
K. R. Sujithan, Jonathan M. D. Hill · 1997
We study the pragmatics of integrating collection types, that model a broad class of nonnumerical applications, into the Bulk Synchronous Parallel (BSP) model which abstracts a diversity of parallel architectures using just four numerical parameters. We outline how the collection types have been built on-top of the direct BSP programming environment provided by BSPlib, give results on a SGI PowerChallenge and IBM SP2, and discuss how these types can help implement object databases. 1 Introduction Parallel computers have been successfully deployed in many scientific and numerical application areas, but their use in commercial applications, which are often non-numerical in nature, has been scarce. One of the impediments in the long-term commercial uptake of parallel computing has been the proliferation of differing machine architectures and corresponding programming models. However, due to several technological and economic reasons, the various classes of parallel computers such as shar...