A dataflow language with object-based extension and its implementation on a commercially available parallel machine

We propose a massively parallel programming language, called "V," which would minimize the difficulties in writing massively parallel programs. To abstract away the timing problem in writing parallel programs, we based our work on a dataflow-based functional programming language. Then, we extended the base language with an object-based abstraction, called "agent," to write parallel entities which contain their own states and can communicate with each other. In addition to connecting agents explicitly, an abstraction of ensembles of agents on a predefined topology description, called "field," is introduced in order to write a massively parallel program which naturally reflects the structure of a problem. In this paper, we also discuss the implementation of V, including a preliminary evaluation, on a commercially available distributed-memory parallel machine, Fujitsu AP1000. Although it is easy to extract parallelism at various levels, including finegrained parallelism, from V programs, it is difficult to run V programs efficiently on stock parallel machines. Nevertheless, we tried to implement V on a stock parallel machine, since our aim is to develop a language that would be practical, not only on special fine-grained machines, but also stock machines.