Facilitating the development of portable parallel applications on distributed memory systems

In this paper, two programming tools are presented, facilitating the development of portable parallel applications on distributed memory systems. The Orchid system is a software platform, i.e. a set of facilities for parallel programming. It consists of mechanisms for transparent message passing and a set of primitive functions to support the distributed shared memory programming model. In order to free the user from the tedius task of parallel programming, a new environment for logic programming is introduced: the Daffodil framework. Daffodil, implemented on top of Orchid, evaluates pure PROLOG programs exploiting the inherent AND/OR parallelism. Both systems have been implemented and evaluated on various platforms, since the layered structure of Orchid ensures portability only by re-engineering a small part of the code.