The Howdy Glossary

Dataparallel C, developed by Thinking Machines Corporation in the 1980s for the Connection Machine supercomputer project, allows high-performance computing applications to harness parallelism simply through syntactic extensions to ANSI C. By facilitating data-level parallelism across thousands of processors without requiring intricate low-level programming or specialized processor communication knowledge, it became an attractive choice for scientific and engineering computations.

The language's distinct features include its seamless integration with ANSI C, enabling developers to express parallelism directly and efficiently. This user-friendly approach allowed programmers to leverage massively parallel hardware without needing deep expertise in the underlying processor architecture. However, Dataparallel C faced competition from other languages like Parallel C and High-Performance Fortran (HPF), which offered similar capabilities but differed in syntax and application domains. Contemporary options such as OpenMP and MPI provide more extensive constructs for shared-memory and distributed-memory systems but may involve a steeper learning curve.

Dataparallel C's primary advantage lies in its straightforward method of expressing data-level parallelism, making it accessible to developers familiar with ANSI C. This simplicity enabled efficient utilization of parallel computing resources, particularly benefiting scientific and engineering fields that demanded high performance on massively parallel hardware. Its design catered to programmers with varying levels of expertise, streamlining the development process for those optimizing performance in complex computational applications.