ALCOMFT-TR-01-139

A. Stewart, M. Clint, J. Gabarr\'o and M. Serna
Towards refining BSP programs into loosely coupled distributed systems
Barcelona. Work package 4. June 2001.

Abstract: An experiment is conducted to assess the feasibility of transforming BSP computations into loosely coupled distributed systems employing asynchronous point-to-point communications. The BSP model bundles communications together before performing simultaneous message delivery at a synchronisation point, whereas the loosely coupled framework manages each message in isolation. The potential benefits of the proposed transformation are: 1. a safe development framework for loosely coupled systems; the transformational approach preserves semantics and ensures that the resulting system has matching deadlock-free communications; and 2. the BSP synchronisation mechanism is relaxed into a series of point-to-point communications; in certain circumstances (visibility) the transformed program may be more efficient than the original as a result of the removal of synchronisation barriers.

Postscript file: ALCOMFT-TR-01-139.ps.gz (61 kb).