Farming: Towards a Rigorous Definition and Efficient Transputer Implementation

This paper documents the early results of a rigorous study of farming, one of the method of parallelising programs. This study involved the theory of programming UNITY and extensive testing on farming harness designs. We show that farming can be used to parallelise a much larger domain of applications than it is often thought. We also arrived at how to implement efficient harnesses for the first generation of Inmos transputers. (An updated version of the paper that appeared in `Transputer systems - ongoing research', Alastair Allen (ed.), pp49-62, Proceedings of the fifteenth conference of the World occam and Transputer User Group, 1992, IOS Press, Amsterdam.)