COMPILER TECHNIQUES FOR MATLAB PROGRAMS ... - CiteSeerX

Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
The development ofsoftware for scientic computation on high-performance computers is a
very dicult and time-consuming task, requiring not only an understanding of the algorithms
to be implemented, but also a detailed knowledge of the target machine and the software
environment. Several approaches to facilitate the development and maintenance of programs
for high-performance computers are currently under study. One approach is the automatic
translation of conventional programming languages, notably Fortran, into parallel form. Polaris
[BEF + 94] and Parafrase-2 [PGH + 89], developed at Illinois, and SUIF [AALL93], a
compiler developed at Stanford, are examples of this rst approach. Another approach is
to extend conventional languages with simple annotations and parallel constructs. This second
approach also involves the development of translation techniques for the extensions.
Examples include High Performance Fortran [Hig93] and pC++ [BBG + 93].
A third approach
is to accept a very high-level description of the mathematical problem to be solved
and automatically compute the solution in parallel. Examples of this approach are //ELL-
PACK [HRC + 90], developed at Purdue, ALPAL [Coo88], developed at Lawrence Livermore
Laboratories, and EXTENT [DGK + 94], developed at Ohio State University.
We addressed the problem of development of software for scientic computation on highperformance
computers by designing FALCON [DGG + 95b, DGG + 95a], a developmentenvironment
that combines the three approaches described above.
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