Filaments v1.0 availible

Trevor wrote to let us all know that Filaments is ready for download. For those you who are unfamiliar with Filaments, it is a library package that can be used to create architecture-independent parallel programs-that is, programs that are portable and efficient across different parallel machines. Filaments can be used directly as a subroutine library to write parallel programs, but it is most useful as the target of a parallelizing compiler. Click below for the full release annoucement.

Filaments version 1.0 is now freely available and can be downloaded on the web at http://www.cs.uga.edu/~dkl/filaments/dist.html or via the the University of Georgia CS Department anonymous FTP server at ftp://ftp.cs.uga.edu/pub/filaments.

The current distribution runs on the following (homogeneous) architectures:

• cluster of Sparcs running Solaris,
• cluster of PCs running Solaris,
• cluster of PCs running Linux,
• SPARC/Solaris symmetric multiprocessor, and
• SGI/Irix symmetric multiprocessor.

The distribution comes with extensive documentation (a programmer's manual plus four other technical papers) and eight sample application kernels.

Filaments is a library package that can be used to create architecture-independent parallel programs-that is, programs that are portable and efficient across different parallel machines. Filaments can be used directly as a subroutine library to write parallel programs, but it is most useful as the target of a parallelizing compiler.

The package uses a carefully designed API along with machine-specific runtime libraries and preprocessing that allow programs to run unchanged on both shared- and distributed-memory machines. Most importantly, applications programmed in Filaments run efficiently, achieving a speedup of over 4 on 8 processors or nodes in almost all tests that have been performed.

Any questions should be directed to [e-mail].