The Operational Semantics of Parallel Functional Programs

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Reasoning about the operational behavior of programs written in languages whose parallelism is implicit can be difficult. This is true for purely functional languages, logic programming languages, and even imperative languages such as Fortran (when used with a vectorizing compiler). Research is proposed to study formal methods for expressing the operational semantics of parallel (and in particular functional) programs. More specifically, an investigation of the suitability of pomsets for this purpose is proposed. A symbiotic goal is the use of the formal tools to reason about and guide the design of meta- linguistic devices (such as annotations) to refine operational behavior. The research includes addressing deficiencies in previous pomset semantics; applying pomsets in new operational setting; the development of a notion of systems semantics to capture program, compiler, and machine; and the development of abstraction techniques to allow compile-time inferencing of operational behavior.