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Parallel programming with big operators

Published:23 February 2013Publication History
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Abstract

In the sciences, it is common to use the so-called "big operator" notation to express the iteration of a binary operator (the reducer) over a collection of values. Such a notation typically assumes that the reducer is associative and abstracts the iteration process. Consequently, from a programming point-of-view, we can organize the reducer operations to minimize the depth of the overall reduction, allowing a potentially parallel evaluation of a big operator expression. We believe that the big operator notation is indeed an effective construct to express parallel computations in the Generate/Map/Reduce programming model, and our goal is to introduce it in programming languages to support parallel programming. The effective definition of such a big operator expression requires a simple way to generate elements, and a simple way to declare algebraic properties of the reducer (such as its identity, or its commutativity). In this poster, we want to present an extension of Scala with support for big operator expressions. We show how big operator expressions are defined and how the API is organized to support the simple definition of reducers with their algebraic properties.

References

  1. E. Allen, D. Chase, J. Hallett, V. Luchangco, J.-W. Maessen, S. Ryu, G. L. Steele Jr., and S. Tobin-Hochstadt. The Fortress Language Specification. Sun Microsystems, March 2008.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  2. M. Odersky. The Scala Language Specification. EPFL, May 2011.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar

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      • Published in

        cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
        ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 48, Issue 8
        PPoPP '13
        August 2013
        309 pages
        ISSN:0362-1340
        EISSN:1558-1160
        DOI:10.1145/2517327
        Issue’s Table of Contents
        • cover image ACM Conferences
          PPoPP '13: Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming
          February 2013
          332 pages
          ISBN:9781450319225
          DOI:10.1145/2442516

        Copyright © 2013 Authors

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        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        • Published: 23 February 2013

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