Caml-Flight

Project led by Christian Foisy (Ericsson Research) and Emmanuel Chailloux (PPS, Univ. Paris-7).

Caml-Flight is a parallel extension of INRIA's Caml-Light language featuring explicit static processes, explicit communications, deadlock-freedom and determinism. The first two features are inspired by the BSP (Bulk-synchronous parallel) methodology of scalable parallel programming, and the last two are deemed highly desirable by designers of declarative parallel languages:

Die Deadlock-Freiheit und der Determinismus der datenparallelen funktionalen Sprache vereinfachen die Programmentwicklung enorm. Fehler sind reproduzierbar und können so leichter gefunden werden.
H.Kuchen, Eine datenparallele funktionale Sprache für Rechner mit verteiltem Speicher. in W.Mackens and S.Rump (Eds.), Software-Engineering in Scientific Computing, Vieweg Verlag, 1996.

Caml-Flight was born as extension and implementation of the DPML (deterministic parallel ML) theoretical design, a mixture of the ML language and parallel programming with explicit processes. To learn about DPML, please read: parle93, jfla94 and lip94.tsi .

The reference in English for Caml-Flight itself is: C. Foisy and E. Chailloux, Caml Flight: a Portable SPMD Extension of ML for Distributed Memory Multiprocessors in Böhm and Feo Eds. Workshop on High Performance Functional Computing, LLNL, Denver, Colorado, USA, April 1995. A copy of this paper is available here.

Référence bibliographique en français sur Caml-Flight: E. Chailloux et C. Foisy Caml-Flight alpha: Implantation et Application Journées Francophones des Langages Applicatifs (JFLA'95), C. Queinnec and V. V. Donzeau-Gouge and P. Weis, No. 13 de la collection didactique INRIA. Janvier 1995.

Voici une page écrite par Abder Ajaja (ex-DIRO, Université de Montréal) sur l'informatique parallèle et le langage DPML/Caml-Flight.

Voici une distribution de Caml-Flight datée de 1999: cf07.tar.gz.