Automatic Concurrency in Sequencel 1 the Need for New Language Abstractions

This paper presents a programming language which we believe to be most appropriate for the automation of parallel data processing, especially data processing of concern to the oil industry and to the U.S. Federal Agencies involved in the analysis of Satellite Telemetry Data. Focus is placed upon major language issues facing the development of the information power grid. The paper presents an example of the type of parallelism desired in the Grid. To implement this parallelism in such a language as Java we need to specify parallelism explicitly. We show that if we rewrite the same solution in the high level language SequenceL, then parallelism becomes implicit. SequenceL seems therefore to be a good candidate for a Grid Oriented Language, because its abstraction relieves the problem solver of much of the burden normally required in development of parallel problem solutions. Hardware improvements and the general spread of computing and computer applications have created opportunities for scientists and engineers to solve ever more complicated problems. However, there are concerns about whether scientists and engineers possess the software tools necessary to solve these problems and what computer scientists can do to help the situation. The fundamental software tool for problem solving is the programming language. A programming language provides the abstraction employed in solving problems. In order to keep pace with hardware improvements, computer scientists should continually address the problem of language abstraction improvement. When advances in hardware make problems technically feasible c 1999 Published by Elsevier Science B. V.