Paper Details

%T Linda implementation revisted
%A Andrew Douglas, Alan Wood, Antony Rowstron
%E Patrick Nixon
%B Proceedings of WoTUG\-18: Transputer and occam Developments
%X 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\[rs]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.

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