db_connect: Could not connect to paper db at "wotug@dragon.kent.ac.uk"
db_connect: Could not connect to paper db at "wotug@dragon.kent.ac.uk"
%T Linda implementation revisted
db_connect: Could not connect to paper db at "wotug@dragon.kent.ac.uk"
%A Andrew Douglas, Alan Wood, Antony Rowstron
db_connect: Could not connect to paper db at "wotug@dragon.kent.ac.uk"
%E Patrick Nixon
%B Proceedings of WoTUG\-18: Transputer and occam Developments
%X Linda is a model for communication and co\-ordination of
parallel processes. The model provides a virtual shared
memory called tuple space, and primitives to place tuples
into and remove tuples from tuple space. The style of
programming provided by Linda is quite different to the
style of, say, occam. We describe a new implementation of
Linda across a network of transputers. We provide the four
Linda primitives, in, out, rd and eval, together with a new
primitive, collect, developed at York. The implementation
focusses on two issues. The first issue is that the ordering
of out operations in a sequential process must be preserved
if we want Linda to act as a co\-ordination language. Our
implementation provides this. The second issue is the
implementation of eval, Linda\[rs]s mechanism for spawning
processes. We outline an implementation which provides
arbitrary spawning of processes which execute concurrently,
despite the restriction, enforced by the transputer
architecture, of declaring a static number of processes at
compile time. We provide a small example to show how Linda
can be used to write parallel programs, then outline current
work being undertaken at York, which focusses on
interpretive environments for high level parallel
programming techniques. A prototype Linda implementation and
ISETL interpreter have already been developed.