Parallel skeletons for structured composition

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a straightforward solution to the problems of compositional parallel programming by using skeletons as the uniform mechanism for structured composition. In our approach parallel programs are constructed by composing procedures in a conventional base language using a set of high-level, pre-defined, functional, parallel computational forms known as skeletons . The ability to compose skeletons provides us with the essential tools for building further and more complex application-oriented skeletons specifying important aspects of parallel computation. Compared with the process network based composition approach, such as PCN, the skeleton approach abstracts away the fine details of connecting communication ports to the higher level mechanism of making data distributions conform, thus avoiding the complexity of using lower level ports as the means of interaction. Thus, the framework provides a natural integration of the compositional programming approach with the data parallel programming paradigm.