The S/Net's Linda kernel

Abstract

Linda is a parallel programming language that differs from other parallel languages in its simplicity and in its support for distributed data structures. The S/Net is a multicomputer, designed and built at AT&T Bell Laboratories, that is based on a fast, word-parallel bus interconnect. We describe the Linda-supporting communication kernel we have implemented on the S/Net. The implementation suggests that Linda's unusual shared-memory-like communication primitives can be made to run well in the absence of physically shared memory; the simplicity of the language and of our implementation's logical structure suggest that similar Linda implementations might readily be constructed on related architectures. We outline the language, and programming methodologies based on distributed data structures; we then describe the implementation, and the performance both of the Linda primitives themselves and of a simple S/Net-Linda matrix-multiplication program designed to exercise them.