skip to main content
OSTI.GOV title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Title: Language support for parallel computation. Final report, September 1988-September 1989

Technical Report ·
OSTI ID:6856539

This final technical report summarizes the research accomplished under the Expert Science and Engineering (ES E) program by the University of California at Berkeley through Syracuse University. The research effort, entitled Parallel Extensions for Object Oriented Programming, examined communication aspects leading to language support for parallel computation. The work undertaken in this effort has extended concurrent programming languages in their communication primitives. Although many abstraction mechanisms have been used in programming languages, including control abstraction mechanisms (such as procedures) and data abstraction mechanisms (such as data types), communication abstraction mechanisms have been found to be the most useful for parallel/concurrent programming paradigms. Work accomplished in this effort has extended those mechanisms, concentrating on inter-process communication. A formal model for concurrent systems, called the Synchronous Token-based Communicating State (STOCS) model, has been used to model and analyze concurrent systems. Since present concurrent languages do not support any form of analysis of the communication structure of programs, two new constructs based on STOCS formalism have been developed to support high level specification - handshake and unit. A fair and efficient algorithm for execution of multi-process shared events is also presented.

Research Organization:
California Univ., Berkeley, CA (USA). Computer Science Div.
OSTI ID:
6856539
Report Number(s):
AD-A-223072/0/XAB; CNN: F30602-88-D-0027
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English