MVILAIN@G.BBN.COM (Marc Vilain) (03/31/88)
BBN Science Development Program
AI Seminar Series Lecture
AN ARCHITECTURE-INDEPENDENT MODEL
FOR PARALLEL PROGRAMMING
Gary W. Sabot
Harvard University and
Thinking Machines Corporation
(GARY@THINK.COM)
BBN Labs
10 Moulton Street
2nd floor large conference room
10:30 am, Tuesday April 5
The paralation model consists of a new data structure and a small
number of operators. The model has two main goals. As a model, it must
be high-level and abstract. It should ask programmers to describe an
algorithm, not every detail of the algorithm to hardware mapping. This
leads to programming languages that are easy to use for general
application programming. On the other hand, the constructs of the model
must be easy to compile into efficient code for a variety of
architectures (for example, MIMD or SIMD processors; bus-based,
butterfly, or grid interconnect; etc.). An inefficient programming
language, no matter how expressive and easy-to-use, cannot gain
widespread acceptance.
The talk describes the paralation model in detail. Programming
examples are presented in Paralation Lisp, a language based on the
model. A number of compilers for Paralation Lisp have been written.
Paralation Lisp code can currently be run in parallel on the 65,536
processor Connection Machine, or serially on any implementation of
Common Lisp.
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