A Distributed Implementation of Many-to-Many Synchronous Channels

Within the ESPRIT project Hamlet, we have developed a graphical-based Application Design Language (ADL). This language allows a developer to primarily focus on the high-level design of parallel applications in terms of processes communicating by means of message-passing. ADL has been tailored to allow for automated generation of efficient parallel target code. In most cases, this goal can be relatively easily met. However, ADL also supports some high-level communication constructs which may be quite difficult to implement in the general case. In this paper, we discuss one particular implementation aspect, namely that of synchronous channels that allow communication between multiple senders and multiple receivers. Our attention focuses on a distributed, scalable solution for transputer-based systems. This solution is, in fact, also applicable to occam-like languages that permit guarded output statements.