Converse: A Message-Driven Runtime for Charisma

Research on parallel computing has produced a number of different parallel programming paradigms such as message-passing [71,27], data-parallel [33,34,15], object-oriented  [44,18,49], thread-based [29], macro-dataflow, functional languages, logic programming languages, and combinations of these. However, not all parallel algorithms can be efficiently implemented using a single parallel programming paradigm. It may be desirable to write different components of an application in different languages. Also, cross-project reuse of software components is possible only if pre-written components can be integrated into a single application without regard to the programming paradigms used for building those components. For this, we need to support interoperability among multiple paradigms.

This section describes Converse, an interoperable framework for combining components written using multiple languages and their runtime libraries into a single parallel program, so that software components that use different programming paradigms can be combined into a single application without loss of efficiency. Converse provides a rich set of primitives to facilitate development of new languages and notations, and supports new runtime libraries for these languages. This multi-paradigm framework has been verified to support traditional message-passing systems, thread-based languages, and message-driven parallel object-oriented languages, and is designed to be suitable for a wide variety of other languages.