Hierarchical Parallel Computation Models and Software Tools

I assume for now that a previous part explained some basic concepts of parallelism: threads and processes, physically and virtually shared memories. Otherwise, a few pages (2-5) should be devoted to explain these concepts and show simple examples. I outline the needed concepts in § 2.1. My contribution addresses the problem of defining and employing hierarchical models for parallel computation, both on the theoretical side and in practice. In § 2.2 I discuss recent work on parallelism exploitation in HM computation models, and the extension to the memory hierarchy of hierarchical models of parallel computation. In § 2.3 I present a survey of existing software tools that can be applied to exploit HM and parallel computation together.