Languages: chickens or eggs?

• Hardware has driven parallel languages for a while

  • Vectors

    • loop programming practice
    • pragmas and directives
  • Multicomputers

    • PVM and MPI
  • Distributed shared memory

    • shmem and MPI-2 single-sided communication
    • co-array Fortran and UPC
  • Grid computing

    • Java and Jini

• Language efforts for shared memory have languished

  • but there are major issues there as well

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