Introduction to Parallel Computing, Second Edition

Chapter 7. Programming Shared Address Space Platforms

Explicit parallel programming requires specification of parallel tasks along with their interactions. These interactions may be in the form of synchronization between concurrent tasks or communication of intermediate results. In shared address space architectures, communication is implicitly specified since some (or all) of the memory is accessible to all the processors. Consequently, programming paradigms for shared address space machines focus on constructs for expressing concurrency and synchronization along with techniques for minimizing associated overheads. In this chapter, we discuss shared-address-space programming paradigms along with their performance issues and related extensions ...