Parallel functional programming on recursively defined data via data-parallel recursion

  • Authors:

  • Susumu Nishimura;Atsushi Ohori

  • Affiliations:

  • Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Kyoto University, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8502, Japan (e-mail: nisimura@kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp, ohori@kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp);Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Kyoto University, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8502, Japan (e-mail: nisimura@kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp, ohori@kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp)

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Functional Programming
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

This article proposes a new language mechanism for data-parallel processing of dynamically allocated recursively defined data. Different from the conventional array-based data- parallelism, it allows parallel processing of general recursively defined data such as lists or trees in a functional way. This is achieved by representing a recursively defined datum as a system of equations, and defining new language constructs for parallel transformation of a system of equations. By integrating them with a higher-order functional language, we obtain a functional programming language suitable for describing data-parallel algorithms on recursively defined data in a declarative way. The language has an ML style polymorphic type system and a type sound operational semantics that uniformly integrates the parallel evaluation mechanism with the semantics of a typed functional language. We also show the intended parallel execution model behind the formal semantics, assuming an idealized distributed memory multicomputer.