Data Parallel C Extensions

The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) has recently approved a Technical Report describing a set of data-parallel extensions to the ANSI C Programming Language. This set of language extensions, known as the Data Parallel C Extensions (DPCE), builds upon extensive prior experience with data-parallel dialects of ANSI C, primarily Thinking Machines Corporation's C*.

The DPCE design was driven by goals of performance transparency and efficiency, portability, machine independence, and relatively minor changes to C. These goals have been met by adding to ANSI C the notion of shape, parallel types (including parallel pointer types), extended overloaded operators, explicit mechanisms for communications, and elemental functions.

This page provides pointers to more information about DPCE:

• To be added to the e-mail reflector for DPCE: contact Frank Farance (frank@farance.com)

• A gzip-ed Postscript file for the DPCE specification

• An on-line DPCE tutorial by Dave McNamara of Pacific-Sierra Research Corporation

• A gzip-ed Postscript file for the notes of a DPCE tutorial given by Jamie Frankel and Phil Hatcher at Supercomputing `95.

• An on-line errata sheet for the DPCE specification.

• Information on the Pacific-Sierra Research Corporation DPCE project.

• Information on the University of New Hampshire DPCE project.

Comments and questions should be directed to pjh@cs.unh.edu