occam

views updated Jun 27 2018

occam Trademark A programming language devised specifically for use with transputer based systems. occam facilitates the writing of parallel programs for execution on one or more transputers, and is intended to be the normal way of programming transputers. The current version is occam 2.

occam programs are built up from processes, which may be executed sequentially or in parallel: the simplest process is a sequence of actions (assignment, input, or output). Input and output take place through channels that link processes, and synchronization of parallel processes is achieved by causing a process that requests input to halt until some other process generates an output on the specified channel.

It is straightforward to write complex parallel programs in occam: the user does not need to be aware of the number of transputers actually executing his/her program, since processes are distributed over available transputers in a transparent manner by the underlying system.

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