Many different parallel languages and paradigms have been developed, each with its own advantages and niches. To benefit from all of them, it should be possible to link together modules written in different parallel languages in a single application. As the paradigms sometime differ in fundamental ways, this is hard to accomplish. This paper describes a framework, Converse, that supports such multi-lingual interoperability. The framework is meant to be inclusive, and has been verified to support the SPMD programming style, message-driven programming, parallel object-oriented programming, and thread-based paradigms. The framework aims at extracting the essential aspects of the runtime support into a common core, so that language-specific code does not have to pay overhead for features that it does not need.

Parallel Languages Implemented Using Converse

• Parallel Simulation languages and algorithms
• Parallel Java
• Agents
• tSM : Simple messaging with threads
• TEMPO : Threaded Message Passing with Objects
• PVM
• MPI (MICE: Multithreaded MPI implementation using MPICH)

Experimental Implementations:

• pC++
• Cid
• Cilk
• CRL
• ActorFoundry

• Converse Distribution
• Installation and Usage manual [postscript] [html] [pdf]
• Converse Manual [postscript] [html] [pdf]

• Orion Sky Lawlor
• Gengbin Zheng

• 00-05    L. V. Kale, Milind Bhandarkar, and Robert Brunner,  Run-time Support for Adaptive Load Balancing,  In: Rolim J. (Ed.), Parallel and Distributed Processing. Springer Verlag, 2000, ISBN 3-540-67442-X, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 1800, (Proceedings of 4th Workshop on Runtime Systems for Parallel Programming (RTSPP) Cancun - Mexico, March 2000.)
• 99-05     Parthasarathy Ramachandran and Laxmikant V. Kale ,  Web-based Interaction and Monitoring for Parallel Programs (Via Conspector),  Internal report.
• 99-04    Parthasarathy Ramachandran and Laxmikant V. Kale ,  Mulitlingual Debugging Support for Data-driven and Thread-based Parallel Languages,  Lecture Notes in Computer Science: Proc. of 12th International Workshop on Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing (LCPC '99), pages 236-250
• 97-03    L. V. Kale, Milind Bhandarkar, Robert Brunner, N. Krawetz, J. Philips, and A. Shinozaki,  NAMD: A Case Study in Multilingual Parallel Programming,  Proceedings of the Tenth International Workshop on Languages and Compilers for Prallel Computing, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
• 96-09    L. V. Kale and Joshua M. Yelon,  Threads for Interoperable Parallel Programming,  Proceedings of the conference on Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing, 1996
• 96-05    Milind Bhandarkar and L. V. Kale,  MICE: A Prototype MPI Implementation in Converse Environment,  Proceedings of the second MPI Developers Conference, July 1996, pp 26-31. South Bend, Indiana.
• 96-03    Laxmikant V. Kale, Milind Bhandarkar, Narain Jagathesan, Sanjeev Krishnan, and Joshua Yelon,  Converse : An Interoperable Framework for Parallel Programming,  Proceedings of the International Parallel Processing Symposium, Honolulu, Hawaii, April 1996.