BIB-VERSION:: CS-TR-v2.0
ID:: ORSTCS//1992R-ORSTCS-91-80-03
ENTRY:: August 24, 1994
ORGANIZATION:: Oregon State University, Computer Science
TITLE:: Control Abstraction in Parallel Programming Languages
TYPE:: Technical Report
AUTHOR:: Crowl, Lawrence A.
CONTACT:: crowl@cs.orst.edu
AUTHOR:: LeBlanc, Thomas J.
CONTACT:: leblanc@cs.rochester.edu
DATE:: February 1992
PAGES:: 15
COPYRIGHT:: Copyright for the report (c) 1992, by L. A. Crowl and
T. J. LeBlanc.  All rights reserved.  Permission is granted for an
academic use of the report.
RETRIEVAL:: http://www.cs.orst.edu/techpub/reports/1992/1992R-ORSTCS-91-80-03/
RETRIEVAL:: ftp://ftp.cs.orst.edu/techpub/reports/1992/1992R-ORSTCS-91-80-03/fulltext.ps
ABSTRACT:: Control abstraction is the process by which programmers
define new control constructs, specifying a statement ordering
separately from an implementation of that ordering.  We argue that
control abstraction can and should play a central role in parallel
programming.  Control abstraction can be used to build new control
constructs for the expression of parallelism.  A control construct
can have several implementations, representing the varying degrees
of parallelism to be exploited on different architectures.  Control
abstraction also reduces the need for explicit synchronization,
since it admits a precise specification of control flow.  Using
several examples, we illustrate these benefits of control abstraction.
We also show that we can efficiently implement a parallel programming
language based on control abstraction.  We conclude that the enormous
benefits and reasonable costs of control abstraction argue for its
inclusion in explicitly parallel programming languages.
END:: ORSTCS//1992R-ORSTCS-91-80-03