Reagents: expressing and composing fine-grained concurrency

Abstract

Efficient communication and synchronization is crucial for fine grained parallelism. Libraries providing such features, while indispensable, are difficult to write, and often cannot be tailored or composed to meet the needs of specific users. We introduce reagents, a set of combinators for concisely expressing concurrency algorithms. Reagents scale as well as their hand-coded counterparts, while providing the composability existing libraries lack.