Implementation Skeletons in Eden: Low-Effort Parallel Programming

Algorithmic skeletons define general patterns of computation which are useful for exposing the computational structure of a program. Being general structures they qualify as a target for parallelisation, which is most often carried out by providing specialised, non-portable, low-level parallel implementations (architectural skeletons) of each algorithmic skeleton for difierent platforms. In the paper we introduce an intermediate layer of implementation skeletons for the parallel functional language Eden. These are portable high-level skeletons which simplify the design of parallel programs substantially. Runtime experiments on a network of workstations and on a Beowulf cluster have shown that even on such high-latency parallel platforms good speedups can be obtained.