Abstract
We present in this paper a technique for the implementation of rewriting on parallel architectures. Rewriting is a computation paradigm that allows to implement directly an equational specification (eg. an abstract data type). Much work has been done about theoretical aspects of rewriting, which has made this technique of practical interest for programming. The next step for rewriting to be used in practice is now to provide an efficient implementation for it. We present here an implementation technique that enables to take advantage of the computational power of loosely-coupled parallel architectures with any grain size. Restricted to one processor, the efficiency of this technique is in the same order of magnitude as those of functional languages such as interpreted LISP or ML, and we expect an almost linear increase of the efficiency when increasing the number of processors. It is important to notice that this approach allows parallel execution of programs directly from their equationally axiomatized specification, without having to make explicit at all the potential parallelism, thus providing a simple and precise operational semantics.
This research has been partially supported by the GRECO de Programmation of CNRS, the Basic Research Workshop COMPASS of the CEC and contract MRT 89P0423.
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Kirchner, C., Viry, P. (1990). Implementing parallel rewriting. In: Deransart, P., Maluszyński, J. (eds) Programming Language Implementation and Logic Programming. PLILP 1990. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 456. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0024172
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0024172
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