Live Webcast 15th Annual Charm++ Workshop

We describe a parallel programming system for developing machine independent programs for all MIMD machines. Many useful approaches to this problem are seen to require a common base of support, which can be encapsulated in a language that abstracts over resource management decisions and machine specific details. This language can be used for implementing other high level approaches as well as for efficient application programming. The requirements for such a language are defined, and the language supported by the Charm system is described, and illustrated with examples.Charm is one of the first languages to support message driven execution, and embodies unique abstractions such as branch office chares and specifically shared variables. In Part II of this paper, we talk about the runtime support system for Charm. The system thus provides ease of programming on MIMD platforms without sacrificing performance.