  SR (synchronizing resources) is a PASCAL - style language enhanced with
constructs for concurrent programming developed at the University of Arizona in
the late 1980s. MPD (presented in Gregory Andrews' book about Foundations of
Multithreaded, Parallel, and Distributed Programming) is its successor,
providing the same language primitives with a different syntax. The run-time
system (in theory, identical) of both languages provides the illusion of a
multiprocessor machine on a single single- or multi- CPU Unix-like system or a
(local area) network of Unix-like machines. Chair V of the Computer Science
Department of the University of Bonn is operating a laboratory for a practical
course in parallel programming consisting of computing nodes running
NetBSD/arm, normally used via PVM, MPI etc. We are considering to offer SR and
MPD for this, too. As the original language distributions are only targeted at
a few commercial Unix systems, some porting effort is needed, outlined in the
SR porting guide. The integrated POSIX threads support of NetBSD-2.0 should
allow us to use library primitives provided for NetBSD's phtread system to
implement the primitives needed by the SR run-time system, thus implementing 13
target CPUs at once and automatically making use of SMP on VAX, Alpha, PowerPC,
Sparc, 32-bit Intel and 64 bit AMD CPUs.
  This paper describes work in progress.
