Paper Details

Linda implementation revisted

Authors: Douglas, Andrew, Wood, Alan, Rowstron, Antony

Abstract:

Linda is a model for communication and co-ordination of parallel processes. The model provides a virtual shared memory called tuple space, and primitives to place tuples into and remove tuples from tuple space. The style of programming provided by Linda is quite different to the style of, say, occam. We describe a new implementation of Linda across a network of transputers. We provide the four Linda primitives, in, out, rd and eval, together with a new primitive, collect, developed at York. The implementation focusses on two issues. The first issue is that the ordering of out operations in a sequential process must be preserved if we want Linda to act as a co-ordination language. Our implementation provides this. The second issue is the implementation of eval, Linda's mechanism for spawning processes. We outline an implementation which provides arbitrary spawning of processes which execute concurrently, despite the restriction, enforced by the transputer architecture, of declaring a static number of processes at compile time. We provide a small example to show how Linda can be used to write parallel programs, then outline current work being undertaken at York, which focusses on interpretive environments for high level parallel programming techniques. A prototype Linda implementation and ISETL interpreter have already been developed.

Proceedings:

Proceedings of WoTUG-18: Transputer and occam Developments, Patrick Nixon, 1995, pp 125 - 138 published by IOS Press, Amsterdam

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