Program Composition Notation

Program Composition Notation (PCN) is a specification notation for building up larger programs from smaller modules or programs (usually written in C or Fortran). Efficient parallel programming is at the heart of PCN. Larger composed programs are intended to execute efficiently on single-processor machines, multiprocessors with shared memory or distributed multicomputers.

PCN was developed at Argonne National Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology.

PCN includes the language for specifying concurrent algorithms and interfaces to C and Fortran. There is also a PCN toolkit for workstations that allows applications to be developed for supercomputers which includes debugging and performance analysis tools.

PCN is appropriate for applications benefiting from parallel computing such as fluid dynamics, and climate modelling.

Sources

Chandy, K. Mani and Taylor, Stephen (1990), A Primer for Program Composition Notation. Technical Report. California Institute of Technology. [CaltechCSTR:1990.cs-tr-90-10]
PCN article in the Free Online Dictionary of Computing

Parallel computing

General	Distributed computing Cloud computing High-performance computing

Levels	Bit Instruction Task Data Memory Loop Pipeline

Multithreading	Temporal Simultaneous Preemptive Cooperative

Theory	PRAM model Analysis of parallel algorithms Amdahl's law Gustafson's law Cost efficiency Karp–Flatt metric Slowdown Speedup

Elements	Process Thread Fiber Instruction window

Coordination	Multiprocessing Memory coherency Cache coherency Cache invalidation Barrier Synchronization Application checkpointing

Programming	Stream Processing Dataflow programming Models Implicit parallelism Explicit parallelism Concurrency Non-blocking algorithm

Hardware	Flynn's taxonomy SISD SIMD MISD MIMD Dataflow architecture Pipelined processor Superscalar processor Vector processor Multiprocessor symmetric asymmetric Memory shared distributed distributed shared UMA NUMA COMA Massively parallel computer Computer cluster Grid computer

APIs	Ateji PX Boost.Thread Charm++ Cilk Coarray Fortran CUDA Dryad C++ AMP Global Arrays MPI OpenMP OpenCL OpenHMPP OpenACC TPL PLINQ PVM POSIX Threads RaftLib UPC TBB

Problems	Embarrassingly parallel Software lockout Scalability Race condition Deadlock Livelock Starvation Deterministic algorithm Parallel slowdown

Category: parallel computing Media related to parallel computing at Wikimedia Commons

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