Abstract

We present a framework for designing parallel programming languages whose semantics is functional and where communications are explicit. To this end, we specialize Brookes and Geva's generalized concrete data structures with a notion of explicit data layout and obtain a CCC of distributed structures called arrays. We find that arrays' symmetric replicated structures, suggested by the data-parallel SPMD paradigm, are incompatible with sum types. We then outline a functional language with explicitly-distributed (monomorphic) concrete types, including higher-order, sum and recursive ones. In this language, programs can be as large as the network and can observe communication events in other programs. Such flexibility is missing from current data-parallel languages and amounts to a fusion with their so-called annotations, directives or meta-languages. 1 Explicit communications and functional programming Faced with the mismatch between parallel programming languages and the requirements o...

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