Shared Environments for Distributed ML

Introduction Standard ML is an established programming language with a well-understood semantics [MTH90]. Several projects have enriched the language with primitives or constructions for concurrency, primarily to provide a better way to describe parallel applications such as interactive multi-windows systems. LCS [BL94], designed at LAAS-CNRS, and Poly/ML [Mat91], being developed at the University of Edinburgh, are such languages. Our investigations concern parallel implementations of these languages in order to speed up the execution of parallel programs. The parallel machines we are interested in are networks of workstations, because they are widely available. Poly/ML has been implemented on various targets including distributed architectures [Mat91]. The sequential and distributed implementations use the same compiler; only the lowest levels of the implementations, the run-time systems, are different. A distributed run-time system has also been designed for the LCS system [