Active objects for coordinating BSP computations (short paper)

Among the programming models for parallel and distributed computing, one can identify two important families. The programming models adapted to data-parallelism, where a set of coordinated processes perform a computation by splitting the input data; and coordination languages able to express complex coordination patterns and rich interactions between processing entities. This article takes two successful programming models belonging to the two categories and puts them together into an effective programming model. More precisely, we investigate the use of active objects to coordinate BSP processes. We choose two paradigms that both enforce the absence of data-races, one of the major sources of error in parallel programming. This article explains why we believe such a model is interesting and provides a formal semantics integrating the notions of the two programming paradigms in a coherent and effective manner.