Towards a higher level of abstraction in parallel programming

Abstract

There are substantial problems with exploiting parallelism, particularly massive parallelism. One attempt to solve these problems is general-purpose parallelism, which searches for models that are abstract enough to be useful for software development, but that map well enough to realistic architectures that they deliver performance. We show how the skeletons model is a suitable general-purpose model for massive parallelism, and show its power by illustrating a new algorithm for search in structured text. The algorithm is sufficiently complex that it would have been hard to find without the theory underlying the Bird-Meertens formalism. The example also demonstrates the opportunities for parallelism in new, non-scientific and non-numeric applications.