REFINING A CONVENTIONAL LANGUAGE FOR RACE-FREE SPECIFICATION OF PARALLEL ALGORITHMS.

Many languages have been designed to facilitate the writing of programs for highly parallel computers. Some of these (declarative and applicative languages) embody new ways of expressing computations so that inherent parallelism is obvious; others are extensions to conventional language that permit the user to specify parallel execution and synchronized interprocess communication. In contrast to these approaches, the authors propose the use of a conventional-looking language which has been modified to permit the user to be more precise in the specification of algorithms. The resulting type of language, processed by relatively standard compiler flow analysis techniques, possesses the desirable combination of ease of expression, familiarity, independence from specific machine characteristics (such as parallelism width), and provable freedom from race conditions.