A skeleton library

Abstract

Today, parallel programming is dominated by message passing libraries such as MPI. Algorithmic skeletons intend to simplify parallel programming by increasing the expressive power. The idea is to offer typical parallel programming patterns as polymorphic higher-order functions which are efficiently implemented in parallel. The approach presented here integrates the main features of existing skeleton systems. Moreover, it does not come along with a new programming language or language extension, which parallel programmers may hesitate to learn, but it is offered in form of a library, which can easily be used by e.g. C and C++ programmers. A major technical difficulty is to simulate the main requirements for a skeleton implementation, namely higher-order functions, partial applications, and polymorphism as efficiently as possible in an imperative programming language. Experimental results based on a draft implementation of the suggested skeleton library show that this can be achieved without a significant performance penalty.