ALDIMS - A Language for Programming Distributed Memory Multiprocessors

Abstract

In this paper we present ALDIMS, a language that combines the expressibility of general functional (MIMD) parallelism with compact expressibility of data (SPMD) parallelism. It uses distributed data structures for specifying data partitions and single assignment variables as abstract means of inter-process communication. Constructs for unstructured parallelism and process placement specifications make general MIMD parallelism expressible. We describe the issues of implementing process invocation and communication primitive generation. We also discuss source level parallelization and optimization issues and strategies.