Chart Parsing for Loosely Coupled Parallel Systems

Abstract

Of the parallel systems currently available, far and away the most common are loosely coupled collections of conventional processors, and this is likely to remain true for some time. By loosely coupled I mean that the processors do not share memory, so that some form of stream or message-passing protocol is required for processor-processor communication. It follows that in most cases the programmer must make explicit appeal to communication primitives in the construction of software which exploits the available parallelism. Even in shared-memory systems, the absence of parallel constructs from available programming languages may mean that appeal to a similar communication model may be necessary, at least in the short term.