Abstract

. Coordination languages for parallel and distributed systems specify mechanisms for creating tasks and communicating data among them. These languages typically assume that (a) once a task begins execution on some processor, it will remain resident on that processor throughout its lifetime, and (b) communicating shared data among tasks is through some form of message-passing and data migration. In this paper, we investigate an alternative approach to understanding coordination. Communication-passing style (CmPS) refers to a coordination semantics in which data communication is always undertaken by migrating the continuation of the task requiring the data to the processor where the data resides. Communication-passing style is closely related to continuation-passing style (CPS), a useful transformation for compiling functional languages. Just as CPS eliminates implicit call-return sequences, CmPS eliminates implicit inter-processor data communication and synchronization reque...

Citations