Imperative BSPlib-style Communications in Bulk Synchronous Parallel ML

International audienceBulk synchronous parallelism (BSP) offers an abstract and simple model of parallelism yet allows to take realistically into account the communication costs of parallel algorithms. BSP has been used in many application domains. BSPlib and its variants are programming libraries for the C language that support the BSP style. Bulk Synchronous Parallel ML (BSML) is a library for BSP programming with the functional language OCaml. It is based on an extension of the lambda-calculus by parallel operations on a data structure named parallel vector. BSML offers a global view of programs, i.e. BSML programs can be seen as sequential programs working on a parallel data structure (seq of par) while a BSPlib program is written in the SPMD style and understood as a parallel composition of communicating sequential programs (par of seq). The communication styles of BSML and BSPlib are also quite different