Lambda the Ultimate

eskimo: experimenting with skeletons in the shared address model. M. Aldinucci, 2003.

We discuss the lack of expressivity in some skeleton-based parallel programming frameworks. The problem is further exacerbated when approaching irregular problems and dealing with dynamic data structures. Shared memory programming has been argued to have substantial ease of programming advantages for this class of problems. We present the eskimo library which represents an attempt to merge the two programming models by introducing skeletons in a shared memory framework.

Based on some simple extensions to C, the library allows to work on large distributed structures following compositional functional semantics.

The basic idea under eskimo is to abstract both (dynamic) data structures and application flow of control in such a way that they are orthogonalized.