Universitat des Saarlandes

We present a new programming language designed to allow the convenient expression of algorithms for a parallel random access machine PRAM The language attempts to satisfy two potentially conicting goals On the one hand it should be simple and clear enough to serve as a vehicle for humantohuman communication of algorithmic ideas On the other hand it should be automatically translatable to e cient machine ie PRAM code and it should allow precise statements to be made about the amount of resources primarily time consumed by a given program In the sequential setting both objectives are reasonably well met by the Algollike languages eg with the RAM as the underlying machine model but we are not aware of any language that allows a satisfactory expression of typical PRAM algorithms Our contribution should be seen as a modest attempt to ll this ga