University of Oxford Parallel Applications Centre
We are pleased to announce the third official release of the Oxford BSP Toolset which conforms to the BSPlib programming library definition. BSPlib is an SPMD communications library, and is based on the Bulk Synchronous Parallel (BSP) model of parallel computation. The main feature of BSPlib is two modes of communication, one capturing a BSP oriented message passing approach, and the other reflecting a (one-sided) direct remote memory access paradigm. The core BSP library consists of just 20 primitives. All the sources of the library, and accompanying profiling tools are freely available by anonymous FTP; details below.
To subscribe to a mailing list for toolset users, mail bsplib-users-request@comlab.ox.ac.uk. Any bug reports should be sent to bsplib-bugs@comlab.ox.ac.uk, in a style similar to the active bug report list which is kept here.
Updated 30th September 1998The source distribution of the library and profiling tools are available as a gzipped tar archive from here. Previous releases are not available any more. Separate binary releases of the software for different platforms may appear at a later date/release. A copy of the installation guide, which comes bundled with the distribution, can also be downloaded from here.
A pre-compiled version for Windows NT is available from here. We strongly advise people to use this version, in preference to building their own version from the source distribution above
Two factors guide the installation of the toolset: (1) the machine architecture and operating system release; and (2) the type of device used as the communication medium. To date, the tested architectures are:
| MACHINE | bsparch tag |
| Silicon Graphics Power Challenge (Irix 6.x) | SGICHALL64 |
| Silicon Graphics Origin 2000 (Irix 6.x) | SGIORIGIN |
| Silicon Graphics workstation (Irix 5.x, 6.x) | SGI |
| IBM SP2 running AIX | SP2 |
| Cray T3E | CRAYT3E |
| Cray T3D | CRAYT3D |
| Parsytec Explorer | PARSYTEC |
| Transtech Paramid | PARAMID |
| Convex SPP | CONVEXSPP |
| SunOS 4.1.x | SunOS |
| SunOS 5.x | Solaris |
| PC based Unix | LINUX |
| PCs running Windows NT | WIN32 |
| Digital's alpha boxes | OSF1 |
| Hitachi SR2001 | HITACHIMPP |
The tested communication devices are shown below. It should be noted, that only a small subset of the cross-product of architectures and devices are valid builds of the toolset.
| COMMUNICATIONS MEDIUM | bsparch -device tag |
| System V shared memory | SHMEM_SYSV |
| UDP/IP | MPASS_UDPIP |
| UDP/IP like 3com device driver | MPASS_3C905B |
| TCP/IP | MPASS_TCPIP |
| SGI specific shared memory operations | SHMEM_SGI |
| Windows NT shared memory | SHMEM_WIN32 |
| p=1, sequential version of the library | SHMEM_NULL |
| Message Passing Interface | MPASS_MPI |
| IBM's message passing system | MPASS_MPL |
| PARMACS message passing library | MPASS_PARMACS |
| Message passing on the Parsytec GC | MPASS_PARIX |
| Express (Parasoft Ltd) message passing | MPASS_EXPRESS |
| Cray Shmem one-sided communications | DRMA_SHMEM |
The Oxford BSP toolset was written using a home grown literate programming system (see litToTex and litToPgm). The code is written using LaTeX, with program text placed between the \begin{code} and \end{code} delimeters.
A Postscript file of the source (with LaTeX comments) of the core library can be found here; the source of the level-1 library that contains the collective communications can be found here; and the source code for the TCP/IP communications sub-system can be found here.
The Oxford BSP Toolset is a product of the BSP Programming Environment, a UK Engineering Physical Sciences Research Council project in the Portable Software Tools for Parallel Architectures Programme. Our partners in this enterprise are British Aerospace Sowerby Research Centre and NAG Ltd.
© Oxford Parallel 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998
Please send comments to
Jon Hill
Need more information? See: What's New in BSP Worldwide