An Immediate Concurrent Execution (ICE) Abstraction Proposal for Many-Cores

Abstract

Settling on a simple abstraction that programmers aim at, and hardware and software systems people enable and support, is an important step towards convergence to a robust many-core platform. The current paper: (i) advocates incorporating a quest for the simplest possible abstraction in the debate on the future of many-core computers, (ii) suggests “immediate concurrent execution (ICE)” as a new abstraction, and (iii) argues that an XMT architecture is one possible demonstration of ICE providing an easy-to-program general-purpose many-core platform.