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The expressive power of simple parallelism

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PARLE '89 Parallel Architectures and Languages Europe (PARLE 1989)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 366))

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Abstract

We explore an algebra for networks consisting of a fixed number of reactive units, communicating synchronously over a fixed linking structure. This algebra has only two operators: disjoint parallelism, where two networks are composed in parallel without any interconnections, and linking, whereby an interconnection is formed between two ports. The intention is that these operators correspond to the primitive steps when constructing networks. The algebra is simpler than existing process algebras, and we investigate its expressive power. The results are: (1) Expressibility of behaviours: with only three simple processing units, every finite-state behaviour can be constructed. (2) Expressibility of operators: we characterise the network operators which are expressible within the algebra.

A large part of this research was done while the author was on leave at the University of Edinburgh, supported by a grant from the British Science and Engineering Research Council.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Box 1263, S-164 28, Kista, Sweden

    Joachim Parrow

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  1. Joachim Parrow
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Eddy Odijk Martin Rem Jean-Claude Syre

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© 1989 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Parrow, J. (1989). The expressive power of simple parallelism. In: Odijk, E., Rem, M., Syre, JC. (eds) PARLE '89 Parallel Architectures and Languages Europe. PARLE 1989. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 366. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-51285-3_54

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-51285-3_54

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-51285-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-46184-5

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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