Stepwise refinement of parallel algorithms

AbstractThe refinement calculus and the action system formalism are combined to provide a uniform method for constructing parallel and distributed algorithms by stepwise refinement. It is shown that the sequencial refinement calculus can be used as such for most of the derivation steps. Parallelism is introduced during the derivation by refinement of atomicity. The approach is applied to the derivation of a parallel version of the Gaussian elimination method for solving simultaneous linear equation systems