A New Stack Techniquefor the Management of Runtime Structuresin Distributed

A new technique for the management of runtime structures in distributed implementations is presented. Instead of storing the runtime stacks of parallel processes as linked lists of function blocks in a heap structure, the local stacks of several parallel processes, which are executed on the same processor element, are stored in an interleaved manner on a single physical stack, called the meshed stack. The technique originated from the stack organisation in the well known Warren Abstract Machine (WAM) for logic languages, where the runtime information of several alternative computation branches is stored on a single stack. In principle, the meshed stack technique is independent of the implemented language. We will explain it for the parallel implementation of functional languages. The new technique supports sequential and parallel evaluations equally well.