Object-oriented parallel processing with Mentat

Mentat is an object-oriented parallel processing system that addresses three problems endemic to parallel computing, the difficulty of writing parallel programs, the difficulty achieving portability of those programs, and the difficulty exploiting contemporary heterogeneous architectures. Mentat is a complete parallel application development environment consisting of the Mentat Programming Language (MPL) compiler, a run-time system that supports dynamic data dependence detection, a complete post mortem debugger, resource management and accounting capabilities, and various utilities to aid the programmer and system administrator. This paper provides a basic introduction to the philosophy behind Mentat and the MPL, and then focuses on application performance. The objective is to give the reader insight into how Mentat performs on different classes of applications. For each of four applications we sketch the implementation and present performance results.