A practical access to the theory of parallel algorithms

Abstract

We describe a parallel programming environment that implements the PRAM (Parallel Random Access Machine) model. The programming environment consists of a C-based PRAM programming language called FORK with a compiler, libraries and tools, and a fast PRAM simulator. The software is freely available for Unix workstations. The programming environment and a systematic way of writing structured parallel programs for the PRAM model are described in a recent textbook.Even though the programming environment was originally developed for a hardware research project, we show that the system is also especially suited for complementing classical theory courses on PRAM algorithms by programming exercises that allow students to experiment with PRAM-style parallelism and actually implement the algorithms as they appear in the theory textbooks.We describe how the environment was used in a recent graduate-level course on parallel algorithms, and report on feedback that we got from the participants.