Exceptions for Algorithmic Skeletons

Mario Leyton (1) , Ludovic Henrio (2) , José Piquer (1)

1 NIC Research Labs [Chile]
2 OASIS - Active objects, semantics, Internet and security

Algorithmic Skeletons offer high-level abstractions for parallel programming based on recurrent parallelism patterns. Patterns can be combined and nested into more complex parallelism behaviors. Programmers fill the skeleton patterns with the functional (business) code, which transforms the generic skeleton into a specific application. However, when the functional code generate exceptions, this exposes the programmer to details of the skeleton library, breaking the high-level abstraction principle. Furthermore, related parallel activities must be stopped as the exception is raised. This paper describes how to handle exceptions in Algorithmic Skeletons without breaking the high-level abstractions of the programming model. We describe both the behavior of the framework in a formal way, and its implementation in Java: the Skandium Library.

Domains: Programming Languages [cs.PL]

Mario Leyton, Ludovic Henrio, José Piquer. Exceptions for Algorithmic Skeletons. 16th Int. European Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing (Euro-Par 2010), 2010, Italy. ⟨hal-00486108⟩