Dagger: combining benefits of synchronous and asynchronous communication styles

Communication using blocking receives is the commonly used mechanism in parallel programming today. Message driven execution is an alternate mechanism which does not use receive style statements at all. The message driven execution style promotes the overlap of computation and communication. Programs written in this style exhibit increased latency tolerance: their performance does not degrade significantly with latency. It also induces compositionality: multiple independently developed modules can be combined correctly without loss of efficiency. However, as the flow of control is not explicit in such programs, they are often difficult to develop and debug. The authors present a coordination language called Dagger to alleviate this problem. The language has been implemented in the Charm parallel programming system, and runs programs portably on a variety of parallel machines.<>