Conjoined Events: Paper and Slides

I’m just back from a trip to America which began by attending Advances in Message Passing 2010 to present a paper on conjunction, something I’ve posted about on this blog before. I’ve put the paper and slides (with notes) up on my website, for those that are interested. It’s focused entirely on conjunction; CHP doesn’t really appear in the paper, but all the examples in the slides were in Haskell.

I think it’s accurate to say that most of the other researchers at the workshop were interested in a slightly different aspect of message-passing to me. For most of them, message-passing was about using things like MPI to communicate between workers and farmers for parallel speed-up. You can use CHP for that, but most of the examples on this blog (and the examples are in the paper) are about the communications driving the programs, and being part of the program: communications as part of the computation process in concurrent programs, not just a way to facilitate parallel programming. I find there is an elegance in some of CHP’s process-oriented style that makes it more fun to use, but it may well be that their style of parallel programming is a more pragmatic use given the increasing availability of parallel processors.