THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF

One of the major current challenges in computer science is providing program-ming models and abstractions that allow efficient and correct parallel programs to be expressed. The challenge occurs in a number of domains, with different scales of paralellism required. In the consumer space, eight or ten cores will soon be common on desktop computers, and the performance of software which can-not take full advantage of many cores will lag. In the scientific space, scientific investigations increasingly require computationally intensive simulation and data crunching on computer clusters. Coordination languages are one way in which the problem of writing parallel programs can be made more manageable. A coordination language provides a specialized way to specify the communication and synchronization between the different components of a parallel or distributed application. In many cases, the parallelism in a program is naturally expressed as task parallelism, where inde-pendent tasks which produce and consume data can run in parallel