A Functional Language for Departmental Metacomputing

We have designed a functional data-parallel language called BSML for programming bulk synchronous parallel (BSP) algorithms. Deadlocks and indeterminism are avoided and the execution time can be then estimated. For very large scale applications more than one parallel machine could be needed. One speaks about metacomputing. A major problem in programming application for such architectures is their hierarchical network structures: latency and bandwidth of the network between (parallel) nodes could be orders of magnitude worse than those inside a parallel node. Here we consider how to extend both the BSP model and BSML, well-suited for parallel computing, in order to obtain a model and a functional language suitable for metacomputing.