Treffer: The Sisal Project: Real World Functional Programming

Programming massively-parallel machine is a daunting task for anyhuman programmer and parallelization mayeven be impossible for any compiler. Instead, the functional programming paradigm may prove to be an ideal solution by providing an implicitly parallel interface to the programmer. We describe here the Sisal project #Stream and Iteration in a Single Assignment Language# and its goal to provide a general-purpose user interface for a wide range of parallel processing platforms. 1 Introduction The history of computing has shown shifts from explicit to implicit programming. In the early days, computers were programmed in assembly language, mostly with the purpose of utilizing the available memory space as e#ectively as possible. This came at the cost of obscure, machine-dependent, hard to maintain programs, whichwere designed with high programming e#ort. Fortran ? This research is supported in part by ARPA grant#DABT63-95-0093 and NSF grant 53-4503-3481 was introduced to m.