MANIFOLD: a programming model for massive parallelism

MANIFOLD is a coordination language for orchestration of the communications among independent, cooperating processes in a massively parallel or distributed application. The fundamental principle underlying MANIFOLD is the complete separation of computation from communication. This means that in MANIFOLD: computation processes know nothing about their own communication with other processes; and coordinator processes manage the communications among a set of processes, but know nothing about the computation they carry out. This principle leads to more flexible software made out of more re-usable components, and supports open systems. MANIFOLD is a new programming language based on a number of novel concepts. MANIFOLD is about concurrency of cooperation as opposed to the concern of the classical work on concurrency, that deals with concurrency of competition. In order to better understand the fundamentals of this language and its underlying model, we focus on the kernel of a simple sub-language of MANIFOLD, called MINIFOLD