Paradigma: A Distributed Framework for Parallel Programming

Recent advances in high-speed networks and the newfound ubiquity of powerful processors have revolutionized the nature of parallel computing. It is becoming increasingly attractive to perform parallel tasks on distant, autonomous, and heterogeneous networked machines. This paper presents a simple and efficient new distributed framework for parallel programming known as Paradigma. In this framework, parallel program development is simplified using the Gamma formalism, providing sequential programmers with a straightforward mechanism for solving large-scale problems in parallel. The programmer simply specifies the action to be performed on an atomic data element known as a molecule. The workers compete in simultaneously running the action specified on the various molecules extracted from the input until the entire dataset is processed. The proposed framework is dedicated for fine-grained parallel processing and supports both the Simple program multiple data and multiple program multiple data programming models.