Parallel Programming With Coordination Structures

Abstract

Parallel programs display two fundamentally different kinds of execution behavior: synchronous and asynchronous.Some methodologies, such as distributed data structures, are best suited to the construction of asynchronous programs.In this paper, we propose a methodology for synchronous parallel programming based on the notion of a coordination structure, a direct representation of the multidimensional dataflow patterns common to synchronous programs.We introduce Delirium, a language in which one can concisely express many useful coordination structures.