Structuring parallel and distributed programs

Abstract

Darwin is a configuration language which allows distributed and parallel programs to be structured in terms of groups of process instances which communicate by message passing. In addition to expressing static structure, Darwin can be used to express structures which change dynamically as execution progresses. The authors present a set of examples illustrating the use of Darwin in constructing parallel programs. Since processes can be considered to be an abstraction of physical processors, Darwin can also be used to describe the hardware structure of distributed memory multicomputers in terms of processors and their interconnection. The authors illustrate this for a multicomputer constructed from transputers and show its use in the process of mapping the logical structure of a parallel program to the physical hardware.