High-level management of allocation in a parallel objects environment

The diffusion of parallel architectures is currently limited by the lack of tools to exploit efficiently all available resources with few programming efforts. This is specially a problem in the allocation area. The paper presents a set of allocation tools (ACL) implemented within an object-oriented parallel programming environment. ACL defines a set of directives that permit users to specify the allocation needs of his/her applications without any knowledge of the architecture details. ACL directives drive the run-time support by tuning its general-purpose behaviour to the specific allocation needs of the applications. The effectiveness of the ACL approach is confirmed by testbed applications. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.