Newsgroups: comp.parallel
From: Ken Thomas <K.S.Thomas@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: Ada implementation on parallel machines
Organization: SNARC
Date: Mon, 20 Nov 1995 09:18:21 GMT
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Message-ID: <48ph4t$co3@bright.ecs.soton.ac.uk>

There have been implementations of Ada83 on Sequent balance, Cray and the
Encore Multimax. For Ada95, SGI have supported the gnat project. However, I
have no first hand knowledge of these products. 

The main problem with Ada is the assumption of a shared memory architecture
in the tasking model. Thus parallel programming in Ada95 may depend on
distributed programming techniques. The Annex (E) will help in this respect but
there are still problems namely the replication of the partition.

However, parallel programming in Ada is not impossible. I have used Ada83
(Alsys) on transputer arrays. I have produced a binding to PVM for use with the
gnat system on the MEIKO-CS2 and a network of Sparcs.

Ken Thomas.
Department of Electronics and Computer Science.
University of Southampton



