A Report on the Sisal Language Project

Sisal (Streams and Iterations in Single Assignment Language) is a general-purpose applicative language intended for use on both conventional and novel multiprocessor systems. In this report we discuss the project’s objectives, philosophy, and accomplishments and state our future plans. Four significant results of the Sisal project are compilation techniques for high-performance parallel applicative computation, a microtasking environment that supports dataflow on conventional shared-memory architectures, execution times comparable to those of Fortran, and cost-effective speedup on shared-memory multiprocessors.