Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

Object-oriented programming, due to its encapsulation and message-passing principles, is a suitable basis for the programming of multicomputers. We present mechanisms which allow sequential C++ programs to be transformed into parallel programs, executable on an MIMD architecture, such as the Intel iPSC/2 Hypercube. The basic idea is to provide mechanical transformations, which allow arrays of objects to be distributed over different processors. At run time, a master processor may command other processors, considered slaves, to each create a different subrange of the original array. Subsequently, it may command the slave processors to execute any member functions of the remote array elements. Parallelism is achieved by segregating the send and receive commands issued by the master, which allows the slave processors to operate concurrently.