A Layered Implementation of the Parallel Functional Language Eden

High-level control over parallel process behaviour simplifies the development of parallel software substantially by freeing the programmer from low-level process management details. The latter are handled by a sophisticated runtime system which controls program execution. In this paper we look behind the scenes and show how the enormous gap between high-level parallel language constructs and their low-level implementation has been bridged in the implementation of the parallel functional language Eden. The main idea has been to concentrate the process control in a functional module and to restrict the extensions of the low-level runtime system to a few selected primitive operations.