CPAR-language extensions to C for irregular and adaptive parallel computations

The CPAR language consists of a set of extensions to the C language, designed to support parallel programming on distributed-memory multiprocessors, in particular, irregular and adaptive computations which are hard to do well in languages such as Fortran-90 or High Performance Fortran (HPF). CPAR provides data accesses over a global name space using concepts of communication functions and object streams. These constructs allow programmers to specify interprocessor data transfer between arrays or pointer-based data structures without getting involved with the split phases of "send" and "receive" of a communication. Our experience of using CPAR to program an N-body simulation problem is briefly described.<>