The MPD Programming Language -- Overview

MPD is a variant of the SR programming language. SR has a Pascal-like syntax and uses guarded commands for control statements. MPD has a C-like syntax and C-like control statements. However, the main components of the two languages are the same: resources, globals, operations, procs, procedures, processes, and virtual machines. Moreover, MPD supports the same variety of concurrent programming mechanisms as SR: co statements, semaphores, call/send/forward invocations, and receive and input statements.

Section 1.9 of the MPD book -- Foundations of Multithreaded, Parallel, and Distributed Programming -- gives a synopsis of MPD. Follow the links below for additional information.

• Tutorial and Sample Programs. A tutorial on MPD, illustrated by several programs.

• Synopsis. A summary of the components of MPD and their syntax.

• Compilation and Execution. How to compile, link, and execute MPD programs on single processors, multiprocessors, and clusters.

• Operators and Predefined Functions. This Postscript file contains a copy of Appendix C of the SR book. MPD supports the same kinds of operators and the same predefined functions as does SR; the only difference is that the assignment operator in MPD is "=" rather than ":=". PDF and HTML versions of Appendix C of the SR book are also available. The fonts in the PDF version are kind of hard to read, but they print fine. The HTML version was produced automatically and is kind of ugly, but it is still useful.

The MPD distribution contains numerous additional programs as well as manual pages for the MPD commands. The book The SR Programming Language: Concurrency in Practice contains detailed descriptions of the semantics of SR mechanisms, all of which have duals in MPD. In fact, the MPD distribution contains MPD versions of all the larger programs in the SR book (see examples/srbook in the distribution).


Last updated June 19, 2001

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