A mechanism for specifying parallel procedures

This thesis presents a mechanism that will provide a semantic and syntactic environment for expressing parallel procedures. This mechanism will be referred to as the Parallel Machine. The parallelism of the Parallel Machine is accomplished through an arbitrary number of specialized computing elements that each implement a single command called a Simultaneous Command. Each Simultaneous Command is capable of determining the occasions for its action by observing conditions within the Parallel Machine. There is no restriction on the number of Simultaneous Commands that can be defined or be simultaneously active. Within a parallel procedure expressed as a set of Simultaneous Commands, their ordering is not significant since control of the Parallel Machine is dependent on the effective cooperation of Simultaneous Commands and not on the passage of control through a sequence of commands. Since the Parallel Machine avoids many traditional computing concepts, a new perspective on parallel computation is presented. Procedures can be defined with high levels of parallelism which are free of the structural constraints made necessary by sequential procedures expressed by algorithmic languages using flow of control conventions --Abstract, page ii