Object-Oriented Parallel Processing with Mentat1

Mentat is an object-oriented parallel processing system designed to address three problems that face the parallel computing community, the difficulty of writing parallel programs, the difficulty achieving portability of those programs, and the difficulty exploiting contemporary heterogeneous environments. Writing parallel programs by hand is more difficult than writing sequential programs. The programmer must manage communication, synchronization, and scheduling of tens to thousands of independent processes. The burden of correctly managing the environment often overwhelms programmers, and requires a considerable investment of time and energy. If parallel computing is to become mainstream it must be made easier for the average programmer. Otherwise, parallel computing will remain relegated to specialized applications of high value where the human investment required to parallelize the application can be justified.