Formal specification of virtual process topologies

A lack of adequate and flexible topology support in the popular message passing systems such as Parallel Virtual Machine was a major factor in the development of our Virtual Process Topology Environment. This parallel programming environment provides high level abstractions for interprocess communication, relieving the application developer of the cumbersome task of mapping logical neighbours to their task identifiers within message passing systems. The novel approach of separating topological specification from the APIs provided extreme flexibility to the developers of the applications using regular topologies. We believed that the task of supporting process topologies could be made even easier and, in this paper present our new method which uses recurrence relations to define topologies. Within the new environment, the recurrence relationships can be passed to the topology server which then is used in the generation of the topological specification.