Status and Future Plans for Parallelization of AIPS++

During the past year, the parallel group of AIPS++ has been actively incorporating parallel processing into the most computationally intensive aspects of AIPS++. We report here the status of the AIPS++ parallelization effort and plans for future development. The biggest success of the past year of AIPS++ parallelization has been the implementation of the parallel algorithm applicator class. This class implements parallelism using the Message Passing Interface (MPI). MPI is a portable system that allows data and instructions to be sent to remote processors (either on the same machine or on different machines). New classes derived from this parallel base class will carry out parallelization with a minimal effort from application programmers. This solution addresses most embarrassingly parallel problems, notably spectral line processing. We are also investigating tuned libraries (starting with FFT's), notably the Sgi/Cray Scientific Library (SCSL).