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An operational semantics for Paragon: A design notation for parallel architectures

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Abstract

The need to design and verify architectures to support parallel implementations of declarative languages has led to the development of a novel language, called Paragon, which bridges the gap between the top-level specification of the abstract machine, and its detailed implementation in terms of parallel processes and message passing.

The central technical contributions in this paper are:

  • • The introduction and specification of Paragon, a parallel object-oriented language based on graph rewriting and message passing principles.

  • • An illustration of the approach at work in the design of a parallel supercombinator graph reduction machine.

  • • A sketch proof that this design meets the requirements statement.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, City University, Northampton Square, EC1V 0HB, London, U. K.

    David Bolton

  2. Department of Computing, Imperial College, 180 Queen’s Gate, SW7 2BZ, London, U. K.

    Chris Hankin & Paul Kelly

Authors
  1. David Bolton
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  2. Chris Hankin
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  3. Paul Kelly
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Additional information

Partially funded by ESPRIT BRA 3074: SemaGraph

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Bolton, D., Hankin, C. & Kelly, P. An operational semantics for Paragon: A design notation for parallel architectures. New Gener Comput 9, 171–197 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03037642

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03037642

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