This paper describes the language 8 1/2 , an embedding of data-parallelism in a declarative framework.

We advocate a data-flow approach to data-parallelism to ensure both parallelism expressiveness and efficient exploitation of data-parallel applications on new massively parallel architectures. The rational of this approach is introduced in the first part of the paper. Then we develop an experimental language following these lines and sketch the techniques used to compile such a data-flow data-parallel language. Its compilation, based upon a static execution model enabling an efficient execution of programs, is introduced. 1. The Parallelism and its Expression Through Data 1.1. A Short Taxonomy of Parallelism Expression in Programming Languages The many existing models and languages for parallel programming lead to an overlap of concepts making the design of a taxonomy a hard task. However, we propose in table 1 a framework used to specify the concepts presented in this paper. Two criteria have been selected to classify the languages: the way they let the programmer express control an...

8 ½, an experimental language combining features of collection and stream oriented languages...

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