Programmers using a wide variety of shared-memory multiprocessors
cannot yet rely on the availability of programming tools other than K&R
C and Fortran 77. To overcome the sequential nature of these languages,
vendors usually provide parallel programming primitives via
user-callable libraries. Unfortunately, the vendor-provided libraries
often differ substantially. In addition to providing differing
mechanisms to create and synchronize processes; libraries often have
different models of how the processes share and allocate memory within
their address space.

This paper describes a common library interface to seven different
shared-memory multiprocessors. Surprisingly, this library needs only
two pages of implementation on each of the multiprocessors. However,
the effect on the programming model is significant. Programmers must
use the library's virtual machine model to obtain efficient programs on
all the different physical machines.