DPL-82: A language for distributed processing

Abstract

DPL-82 is a language for composing programs of concurrently- executing processes. Processes may be all on a single machine or may be distributed over a set of processors connected to a network. The semantics of the language is derived from the underlying interprocess communication facility (IPC) and from the dataflow model of computation. This paper discusses the major concepts of the language, namely nodes, arcs, connections, tokens, signals, and activations, and presents examples which illustrate the construction of distributed programs in DPL-82 with internal arcs, external arcs and child arcs. Features for process-to- processor mapping and dead process restart are mentioned. The paper concludes with some ideas for future research.