Swift: The Easy Scripting Language for Parallel Computing (Linux.com)

[Posted June 27, 2013 by jake]

Linux.com introduces the Swift parallel scripting language. It may offer some assistance in solving the parallel programming problems noted by Andreas Olofsson in his keynote at this year's Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. "Swift plays a simple but 'pervasively parallel' coordination role to create the upper level logic of more complex applications, [Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago's Michael] Wilde said. 'It makes it very easy to parallelize what we often call the "outer loops".' Highly parallel applications can thus be composed by gluing together serial algorithms because Swift creates the parallelism automatically at runtime, without explicit direction from the programmer. It does this by first encapsulating the applications that are called within a script as 'functions' with uniform interfaces, and then applying automatic data flow, he said."

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Swift: The Easy Scripting Language for Parallel Computing (Linux.com)

Posted Jun 27, 2013 19:46 UTC (Thu) by aoeu (guest, #84301) [Link]

The crux is:

(from http://www.ci.uchicago.edu/swift/guides/release-0.94/user...)

>Non-array variables are single-assignment, which means that they must be assigned to exactly one value during execution. A procedure or expression will be executed when all of its input parameters have been assigned values. As a result of such execution, more variables may become assigned, possibly allowing further parts of the script to execute.

[...]

>Arrays in Swift are more monotonic - a generalisation of being assignment. Knowledge about the content of an array increases during execution, but cannot otherwise change. Each element of the array is itself single assignment or monotonic (depending on its type). During a run all values for an array are eventually known, and that array is regarded as closed.