An overview of the Adl language project

The purpose of the Adl project is to demonstrate the efficient implementation of data parallel functional programming, firstly on the TMC CM-5 but ultimately on other parallel machines. We have designed a small polymorphic non-recursive language (Adl), which emphasizes high-level operations (second-order combinators) on aggregate structures. The Adl project incorporates the formal description of Adl semantics, translation and optimization, and the design of an abstract data-parallel machine which describes not only the CM-5 but also other distributed memory multicomputers and hence encourages architecture-independent code generation. An executable natural semantic description of translation to the Bird-Meertens Formalism (BMF) has been completed; similar techniques are being used with an optimizer. We also describe an implementation of the abstract machine for the CM-5 implementation. 1 Introduction Exploitation of parallelism in applications is a very attractive concept, but there is..