Skip to main content
U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Techniques for the distributed implementation of recursive programs

Thesis/Dissertation ·
OSTI ID:6341001

Writing efficient distributed programs in conventional Algol-like languages is not easy. This thesis describes techniques that can be used to produce distributed programs from recursive ones. The techniques described could be automated to minimize effort by the programmer. The natural way to traverse a tree in PASCAL is to write a recursive procedure that performs the search. The fully ordered PASCAL search is inherently serial and consequently is an over-specification of the synchronization requirements of many tree traversals. Also, few compilers analyze recursive procedures to determine precise data-flow requirements. The result is that it is difficult to exploit the potential parallelism in a large class of interesting programs without rewriting the programs. The problems of efficiently implementing explicitly recursive programs on multicomputers is studied and some solutions are presented. This thesis describes how to analyze recursive procedures to detect parallelism, how to express that parallelism in a convenient form, and finally how to implement those parallel expressions on a loosely coupled multicomputer. An example from computational astrophysics is used to illustrate several of the problems and some ad hoc solutions.

Research Organization:
Wisconsin Univ., Madison (USA)
OSTI ID:
6341001
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

Similar Records

Parallelizing programs with recursive data structures
Thesis/Dissertation · Sun Dec 31 23:00:00 EST 1989 · OSTI ID:6155938

Parallelizing programs with recursive data structures
Journal Article · Sun Dec 31 23:00:00 EST 1989 · IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems; (USA) · OSTI ID:6445943

Topological analysis of multibody systems for recursive dynamics formulations
Journal Article · Sat Dec 31 23:00:00 EST 1988 · Mechanics of Structures and Machines; (USA) · OSTI ID:7184341