We survey parallel programming models and languages using 6 criteria [:] should be easy to program, have a software development methodology, be architecture-independent, be easy to understand, guranatee performance, and provide info about the cost of programs. ... We consider programming models in 6 categories, depending on the level of abstraction they provide.

Shapely types separate data, represented by lists, from shape, or structure. This separation supports shape polymorphism, where operations are defined for arbitrary shapes, and shapely operations, for which the shape of the result is determined by that of the input, permitting static shape checking. The shapely types are closed under the formation of fixpoints, and hence include the usual algebraic types of lists, trees, etc. They also include other standard data structures such as arrays, graphs and records. 1 Introduction The values of a shapely type are uniquely determined by their shape and their data. The shape can be thought of as a structure with holes or positions, into which data elements (stored in a list) can be inserted. The use of shape in computing is widespread, but till now it has not, apparently, been the subject of independent study. The body of the paper presents a semantics for shape, based on elementary ideas from category theory. First, let us consider some examp...

Shape theory provides a framework for the study of data types in which shape and data can be manipulated separately. This paper is concerned with shape checking, i.e. the detection of shape errors, such as array bound errors, without handling the data stored within. It can be seen as a form of partial evaluation in which data computations are ignored. We construct a simply-typed lambda-calculus that supports a vector type constructor, whose iteration yields types of arrays. It is expressive enough to construct all of the usual linear algebra operations. All shape errors in a term t can be detected by evaluating its shape #t. Evaluation of #t will terminate if that of t does. Keywords shape analysis, partial evaluation, arrays, higher-order. 1 Introduction Shape theory explores the consequences of manipulating shape and data separately (Jay [14]). Shape refers to the data structure in which the data is stored. For example, the shape of a three-dimensional regular array is a tuple of...

With the increasing popularity of parallel programming environments such as PC clusters, more and more sequential programmers, with little knowledge about parallel architectures and parallel programming, are hoping to write parallel programs. Numerous attempts have been made to develop high-level parallel programming libraries that use abstraction to hide low-level concerns and reduce difficulties in parallel programming. Among them, libraries of parallel skeletons have emerged as a promising way towards this direction. Unfortunately, these libraries are not well accepted by sequential programmers, because of incomplete elimination of lower-level details, ad-hoc selection of library functions, unsatisfactory performance, or lack of convincing application examples. This paper addresses principle of designing skeleton libraries of parallel programming and reports implementation details and practical applications of a skeleton library SkeTo. The SkeTo library is unique in its feature that it has a solid theoretical foundation based on the theory of Constructive Algorithmics, and is practical to be used to describe various parallel computations in a sequential manner. 1.

We present a family of parallel algorithms for simple language recognition problems involving bracket matching. The algorithms are expressed in the Bird-Meertens Formalism, exploiting only list operations which are inherently massively parallel. Our intention is to illustrate the practical efficacy with which such algorithms can be derived and expressed given the support of a well understood theoretical foundation. One of the variants produced is of particular interest in that it exploits the same theoretical result twice to produce nested parallelism. 1 Introduction In [8], we investigated an informal methodology for the generation of parallel algorithms based upon exploitation of a fundamental result from the Bird-Meertens "theory of lists". Our main example was an algorithm for the maximum segment sum problem. In this report we provide further examples of the approach. For completeness, the remainder of this section and sections 2 and 3 repeat the introductory material from [8]. Re...

Parallel computers have been successfully deployed in many scientific and numerical application areas, although their use in non-numerical and database applications has been scarce. In this report, we first survey the architectural advancements beginning to make general-purpose parallel computing cost-effective, the requirements for non-numerical (or symbolic) applications, and the previous attempts to develop parallel databases. The central theme of the Bulk Synchronous Parallel model is to provide a high level abstraction of parallel computing hardware whilst providing a realisation of a parallel programming model that enables architecture independent programs to deliver scalable performance on diverse hardware platforms. Therefore, the primary objective of this report is to investigate the feasibility of developing a portable, scalable, parallel object database, based on the Bulk Synchronous Parallel model of computation. In particular, we devise a way of providing high-level abstra...

this document without fee provided it is copied in its entirety and this notice remains attached. the computation and communication of an operation on the data type are arranged. That's a job for the implementer and compiler writer. So there's a separation of concerns at just the right level --- programmers think about monolithic operations on data types, while implementers worry about how to make them happen. This provides architecture independence. If the target machine is replaced during the night by some new machine, even a completely different architecture, there is no need to alter the software. The differences between machines can be hidden by the compiler.

We study the pragmatics of integrating collection types, that model a broad class of nonnumerical applications, into the Bulk Synchronous Parallel (BSP) model which abstracts a diversity of parallel architectures using just four numerical parameters. We outline how the collection types have been built on-top of the direct BSP programming environment provided by BSPlib, give results on a SGI PowerChallenge and IBM SP2, and discuss how these types can help implement object databases. 1 Introduction Parallel computers have been successfully deployed in many scientific and numerical application areas, but their use in commercial applications, which are often non-numerical in nature, has been scarce. One of the impediments in the long-term commercial uptake of parallel computing has been the proliferation of differing machine architectures and corresponding programming models. However, due to several technological and economic reasons, the various classes of parallel computers such as shar...

Document archives contain large amounts of data to which sophisticated queries are applied. The size of archives and the complexity of evaluating queries makes the use of parallelism attractive. The use of semantically-based markup such as SGML makes it possible to represent documents and document archives as data types. We present a theory of trees and tree homomorphisms, modelling structured text archives and operations on them, from which it can be seen that: ffl many apparently-unrelated tree operations are homomorphisms; ffl homomorphisms can be described in a simple parameterised way that gives standard sequential and parallel implementations for them; ffl special classes of homomorphisms have parallel implementations of practical interest. In particular, we develop an implementation for path expression search, a novel powerful query facility for structured text, that takes time logarithmic in the text size. Keywords: structured text, categorical data type, software developme...

List homomorphisms are functions which can be efficiently computed in parallel since they ideally suit the divide-and-conquer paradigm. However, some interesting functions, e.g., the maximum segment sum problem, are not list homomorphisms. In this paper, we propose a systematic way of embedding them into list homomorphisms so that parallel programs are derived. We show, with an example, how a simple, and "obviously" correct, but possibly inefficient solution to the problem can be successfully turned into a semantically equivalent almost homomorphism by means of two transformations: tupling and fusion.