Distributed implementation of programmed graph reduction

Abstract

Programmed graph reduction has been shown to be an efficient implementation technique for lazy functional languages on sequential machines. Considering programmed graph reduction as a generalization of conventional environment-based implementations where the activation records are allocated in a graph instead of on a stack it becomes very easy to use this technique for the execution of functional programs in a parallel machine with distributed memory. We describe in this paper the realization of programmed graph reduction in PAM — a parallel abstract machine with distributed memory. Results of our implementation of PAM on an Occam-Transputersystem are given.