Concrete data structures and functional parallel programming

AbstractA framework is presented for designing parallel programming languages whose semantics is functional and where communications are explicit. To this end, Brookes and Geva's generalized concrete data structures are specialized with a notion of explicit data layout to yield a CCC of distributed structures called arrays. Arrays’ symmetric replicated structures, suggested by the data-parallel SPMD paradigm, are found to be incompatible with sum types. We then outline a functional language with explicitly distributed (monomorphic) concrete types, including higher-order, sum and recursive ones. In this language, programs can be as large as the network and can observe communication events in other programs. Such flexibility is missing from current data-parallel languages and amounts to a fusion with their so-called annotations, directives or meta-languages