Abstract

One problem of parallel computing is that parallel computers vary greatly in architecture so that a program written to run efficiently on a particular architecture, when porting to a different architecture, would often need to be changed and adapted substantially in order to run with reasonable performance on the target architecture. Porting with performance is, hence, labour-intensive and costly. A method of parallel programming using the Bird-Meertens Formalism where programs are formulated as compositions of (mainly) higher order functions on some data type in the data parallel functional style has been proposed as a solution. The library of (mainly) higher-order functions in which all communication and parallelism in a program is embedded could (it is argued) be implemented efficiently on different parallel architectures. This gives the advantage of portability between different architectures with reasonable and predictable performance without change in program source. ...

Citations