Platform portability is one of the utmost demanded properties of a system today, due to the diversity of runtime execution
environment of wide-area networks, and parallel programs are no exceptions. However, parallel execution environments are VERY
diverse, could change dynamically, while performance must be portable as well. As a result, techniques for achieving platform
portability are sometimes not appropriate, or could restrict the programming model, e.g., to simple message passing. Instead,
we propose the use of reflection for achieving platform portability of parallel programs. As a prototype experiment, a software DSM system called OMPC++ was
created which utilizes the compile-time metaprogramming features of OpenC++ 2.5 to generate a message-passing MPC++ code from
a SPMD-style, shared-memory C++ program. The translation creates memory management objects on each node to manage the consistency
protocols for objects arrays residing on different nodes. Read- and write- barriers are automatically inserted on references
to shared objects. The resulting system turned out to be quite easy to construct compared to traditional DSM construction
methodologies. We evaluated this system on a PC cluster linked by the Myrinet gigabit network, and resulted in reasonable
performance compared to a high-performance SMP.