The Münster Skeleton Library Muesli -A Comprehensive Overview

Parallel programming of MIMD machines with distributed memory is typically based on standardmessage passing libraries such as MPI [1], which leads to platform independent and efficientsoftware. However, the programming level is rather low, and the development of a parallel applicationcan be a quite complicated task: Programmers have to think about how to decompose theproblem and distribute it across the collaborating processes, develop a communication protocol tosynchronize processes by passing messages, and eventually integrate the partial solutions into afinal one. Due to the low programming level, programmers have to fight against low-level communicationproblems such as deadlocks, starvation, or overlapping communication and computation.Moreover, the program is split into a set of processes which are assigned to the different processors.Like an ant, each process only has a local view of the overall activity. A globel view of theoverall computation only exists in the programmer’s mind, and there is no way to express it moredirectly on this level. Debugging such applications borders on looking for the famous needle in thehaystack since errors do not occur deterministically. Although debuggers for parallel applicationshave been developed, implementing a parallel program remains tedious and error-prone.[...]