High-Level Process Control in Eden

High-level control of parallel process behaviour simplifies the development of parallel software substantially by freeing the programmer from low-level process management and coordination details. The latter are handled by a sophisticated runtime system which controls program execution. In this paper we look behind the scenes and show how the enormous gap between high-level parallel language constructs and their low-level implementation has been bridged in the implementation of the parallel functional language Eden. The main idea has been to implement the process control in a functional language and to restrict the extensions of the low-level runtime system to a few selected primitive operations.