Continuations in parallelism

Abstract

The use of continuations in the BBN Butterfly Lisp multiprocessor is examined. In Butterfly Lisp, continuations are first class objects, much like vectors or numbers, and are used to implement its parallel computing extensions. Continuations can also be used as a way of modeling parallelism in general. While they may be encoded, certain information remains invariant even as the model of parallelism being used changes. Following the continuation behaviour can yield valuable insight into the parallel structure of programming.<>