Semantics of Minimally Synchronous Parallel ML

This paper presents a new functional parallel language: Minimally Synchronous Parallel ML. The execution time can then be estimated and dead-locks and indeterminism are avoided. It shares with Bulk Synchronous Parallel ML its syntax and high-level semantics but it has a minimally synchronous distributed semantics. Programs are written as usual ML programs but using a small set of additional functions. Provided functions are used to access the parameters of the parallel machine and to create and operate on a parallel data structure. It follows the cost model of the Message Passing Machine model (MPM). 1