"A hardware-design inspired methodology for parallel programming"

Arvind, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT

One source of weaknesses in parallel programming has been the lack of compositionality; independently written parallel libraries and packages don't compose very well. We will argue that perhaps traditional procedural abstraction and abstract data types don't capture the essential differences between parallel and sequential programming. We will present a different notion of modules, based on guarded atomic actions, and view it as a resource to be shared concurrently by other modules. As opposed to implicitly or explicitly specifying parallelism in a program, we think of parallel programming as a process of synthesis from a set of modules with proper interfaces and composition rules. We will draw connections between this hardware-design inspired methodology and traditional approaches to multithreaded parallelism including programming based on transactions.