Communication Statements Research Articles

The relationship of individualism–collectivism and self-construals to communication styles in India and the United States

This study investigated the high-/low-context communication construct in terms of individualistic and collectivist values and self-construals. European American students studying in the United States and Indian students studying in India rated 80 communication statements, 29 self-construal statements and 34 value (individualism/collectivism) statements to examine cultural differences in each construct. As expected, Indians rated themselves as more collectivistic, having more interdependent self-construals, and preferring silence and indirect communication than Americans. Contrary to prior theorization, Indians also rated themselves as more dramatic and more individualistic. Several other expected differences were not apparent in this study. These findings show complex subtleties that defy simple definition by the common rubrics or generalizations of individualism/collectivism, self-construal, or high- and low-context behaviors.

How Do Students Participate in Synchronous and Asynchronous Online Discussions?

The purpose of the study was to investigate how graduate students ( n = 14) participated in on-line discussions over a two-week period to determine the utility of synchronous and asynchronous modes of discussion. The types and amounts of communication statements that participants made in chats and threaded discussions were analyzed using a coding scheme developed by the researchers. Students were randomly assigned to either a small group chat or threaded discussion during one week. In the second week, the groups switched discussion modes and another topic question was provided. The researchers coded the transcribed discussions to determine whether the students' participation was substantive (directly related to the topic) or non-substantive (not directly related to the content) in nature. Results indicated that overall students' discussions included nine types of substantive and non-substantive comments. However, the participants when in the chat showed greater numbers of responding and reacting statements (substantive types) in both weeks than when participating in the threaded discussions. The majority-female group tended to make more comments overall in both types of discussion than did the majority-male group. Student surveys asking for their opinions about these modes of discussion were administered at various points in the semester. Some students found it difficult to follow the dialogue in the chat, but overall enjoyed this type of interaction. The students also enjoyed the threaded discussion for its convenience factor. The computer and on-line skills improved based on the student surveys. The results of the study indicate that both types of discussion are liked and should be considered viable options in on-line learning communities.

TheaddapSystem on the iPSC/860: Automatic Data Distribution and Parallelization

This paper describes theaddapsystem—a parallelizing compiler for distributed memorymimdmachines that automatically computes a data distribution for the arrays of the source program by a branch-and-bound algorithm and parallelizes the inner loops of the program by inserting the necessary communication statements to access nonlocal array sections. The branch-and-bound algorithm incrementally constructs paths in a decision tree where each node on a path corresponds to the distribution of an array of the source program. For each path, a communication analysis tool computes the corresponding communication costs. Based on these costs, the data distribution algorithm tries to find the best data distribution by searching for the cheapest path from a leaf to the root of the decision tree. By rejecting expensive paths as early as possible, the algorithm actually builds only a few paths, corresponding to a small fraction of the decision tree. Therefore, the runtime of the data distribution phase remains quite small also for larger input programs. The structure of the algorithm makes it easy to allow redistributions during program execution. The communication analysis tool computes the communication costs of a data distribution by determining the number and size of the messages that each processor has to receive during program execution. The tool also takes sequentializations into account that are caused by data dependences. A prototype implementation of the system generates code for an Intel iPSC/860. Tests show that the communication costs are determined quite accurately and that the array distributions computed cause only a small communication overhead compared to other data distributions. This results in good speedup values for most of the parallelized programs.

Shared variable oriented parallel precompiler for SPMD model

For the moment, commercial parallel computer systems with distributed memory architecture are usually provided with parallel FORTRAN or parallel C compliers, which are just traditional sequential FORTRAN or C compilers expanded with communication statements. Programmers suffer from writing parallel programs with communication statements.

SUPERB and Vienna Fortran

Distributed-memory systems are powerful tools for solving large-scale scientific and engineering problems. However these machines are difficult to program since the data have to be distributed across the processors and message-passing operations must be inserted for communicating non-local data. In this paper, we discuss SUPERB and Vienna Fortran, two related developments with the objective of providing the user with a higher level programming paradigm while not sacrificing target code performance. The parallelization system SUPERB was developed in the German supercomputer project SUPRENUM from 1985 to 1989. It is based on the Single-Program-Multiple-Data (SPMD) paradigm, allows the use of global addresses, and automatically inserts the necessary communication statements, given a user-supplied data distribution. SUPERB was the first implemented system that translated sequential Fortran 77 into explicitly parallel message-passing Fortran. As a result of the experiences with SUPERB and related research, the language Vienna Fortran was designed within the ESPRIT project GENESIS, in a joint effort of the University of Vienna and ICASE, Nasa Langley Research Center. Vienna Fortran is a machine-independent language extension to Fortran, which includes a broad range of features for the high-level support of advanced application development for distributed-memory multiprocessors. It has significantly influenced the development of High Performance Fortran, a first attempt of language standardization in this area.

A C++ language interface for parallel programming

This paper presents an object-oriented interface for parallel programming, and an algorithm for automatic translation into parallel programs. The programming interface consists of a restricted subset of the object-oriented language C++. Parallelism is defined explicitly at the abstract level of object definitions and method invocations within a single C++ program. The translator algorithm first generates a machine-independent communication graph and proceeds with the creation of the parallel programs, which are demonstrated for transputer systems with the HELIOS operating system. The necessary communication statements are generated automatically.

Parallelising C++-programs for transputer systems

This paper presents an object-oriented interface for parallel programming, and an algorithm for an automatic translation into parallel programs for transputer systems with HELIOS operating system. The programming interface consists of a restricted subset of the object-oriented language C++. The user formulates parallelism explicitly at the abstract level of objects and method invocations within a single C++ program. The translator algorithm first generates a machine-independent communication graph and proceeds with the creation of the parallel programs. The necessary communication statements are generated automatically.

Synchronization of asynchronous processes in CSP

Many concurrent programming languages including CSP and Ada use synchronous message-passing to define communication between a pair of asynchronous processes. Suggested primitives like the generalized alternative command for CSP and the symmetric select statement for Ada allow a process to nondeterministically select one of several communication statements for execution. The communication statement may be either an input or an output statement. We propose a simple algorithm to implement the generalized alternative command and show that it uses fewer messages than existing algorithms.

Simd language design using prescriptive semantics

The goal of this article is to isolate a set of primitives necessary for the construction of SIMD programs and to give a denotational semantics for these primitives. The intent is to devise a language with a simple semantics rather than to propose a language which may be conveniently implemented. The approach taken results in the addition of a synchronous parallel assignment statement and a synchronous communication statement to the familiar sequential programming language control structures of composition, projection and iteration.