Towards refining BSP programs into loosely coupled distributed systems

Abstract

An experiment is conducted to assess the feasibility of transforming BSP computations into loosely coupled distributed systems employing asynchronous point-to-point communications. The BSP model bundles communications together before performing simultaneous message delivery at a synchronisation point, whereas the loosely coupled framework manages each message in isolation. The potential benefits of the proposed transformation are:

1. a safe development framework for loosely coupled systems; the transformational approach preserves semantics and ensures that the resulting system has matching deadlock-free communications; and

2. the BSP synchronisation mechanism is relaxed into a series of point-to-point communications; in certain circumstances ($visibility$) the transformed program may be more efficient than the original as a result of the removal of synchronisation barriers.