MGAP's programming environment and the *C++ language

The MGAP is a special-purpose, workstation co-processor board in which the computing elements are fine grain processors implemented as custom ASICs. In this paper we present the language *C++, used for programming on the MGAP. Using the class concept of C++ we create special parallel data-types like bit, digit, word and array and overload operators to manipulate the parallel data required by the MGAP. The hierarchical relationships among the data-types are used by the compiler to generate parallel code for the MGAP. We demonstrate that using the same high-level language and the same program we can operate on data at all levels of granularity, from bits to arrays, without any loss in performance.