Paper Details

@InProceedings{CandlinLuo89,
  title = "{T}he {I}nvestigation of {C}ommunications {P}atterns in {O}ccam {P}rograms",
  author= "Candlin, Rosemary and Luo, Qiangyi and Skilling, Neil",
  editor= "Wexler, J.",
  pages = "99--108",
  booktitle= "{OUG}-11: {D}eveloping {T}ransputer {A}pplications",
  isbn= "90 5199 020 0",
  year= "1989",
  month= "sep",
  abstract= "The performance of a concurrent computation running on a
     multiprocessor system may depend critically on the way in
     which the program is decomposed and placed on the machine.
     In order to exploit the potential of parallel processors, it
     is necessary to balance the advantage of spreading the
     computational load as thinly as possible over the
     processors, with the disadvantage that increased
     communication delays may slow down the computation. In
     general, there is no satisfactory theoretical model of the
     complex interaction between the amount of computation
     carried out by the individual processes, their frequency of
     communication and the topology of the underlying machine.
     For many programs, it is not easy to see in advance how
     computation will interact with communication, and placement
     strategies which depend only on a static analysis of the
     program structure may not be sufficient. The work described
     here is an attempt to provide useful tools for the occam
     programmer which can be used to investigate communications
     patterns, and to explore different configurations rapidly.We
     think that this approach will be particularly valuable for
     programs which can be decomposed in a natural way into a
     fairly large number of top-level occam processes, so that
     the preliminary parallelization arises out of the nature of
     the application, and the main problem is to place these
     processes on a smaller number of physical processors. This
     is often the case for programs which model real-time
     systems, and we have taken as an example an application from
     chemical engineering. In programs like this, there is
     natural concurrency in the real world which can be easily
     represented in terms of occam processes. At the moment, we
     do not attempt to extract parallelism automatically, or
     handle shared data, though there are a number of systems
     that have tackled these problems (see, for example [1] and
     [2]). Our main aim at this stage is to provide a programmer
     with profiling tools, and see to what extent they can help
     to produce an efficient implementation of the program."
}

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