SL: a "quick and dirty" but working intermediate language for SVP systems

The CSA group at the University of Amsterdam has developed SVP, a framework to manage and program many-core and hardware multithreaded processors. In this article, we introduce the intermediate language SL, a common vehicle to program SVP platforms. SL is designed as an extension to the standard C language (ISO C99/C11). It includes primitive constructs to bulk create threads, bulk synchronize on termination of threads, and communicate using word-sized dataflow channels between threads. It is intended for use as target language for higher-level parallelizing compilers. SL is a research vehicle; as of this writing, it is the only interface language to program a main SVP platform, the new Microgrid chip architecture. This article provides an overview of the language, to complement a detailed specification available separately.