Flagship-a parallel reduction machine for declarative programming

摘要

The Flagship project aimed to develop a scalable parallel machine for declarative programming. A packet reduction model of computation was developed to exploit the implicit parallelism found in declarative languages and a work distribution and scheduling scheme was devised to utilise the resources of the parallel machine efficiently. The article outlines the model of computation and the mechanisms which dynamically control and exploit program parallelism. It also describes the architecture of the machine and presents some performance results which were extracted from detailed simulations.