An Efficient Programming Model for Memory-Intensive Recursive Algorithms using Parallel Disks

In order to keep up with the demand for solutions to problems with ever-increasing data sets, both academia and industry have embraced commodity computer clusters with locally attached disks or SANs as an inexpensive alternative to supercomputers. With the advent of tools for parallel disks programming, such as MapReduce, STXXL and Roomy — that allow the developer to focus on higher-level algorithms — the programmer productivity for memory-intensive programs has increased many-fold. However, such parallel tools were primarily targeted at iterative programs. We propose a programming model for migrating recursive RAM-based legacy algorithms to parallel disks. Many memory-intensive symbolic algebra algorithms are most easily expressed as recursive algorithms. In this case, the programmin