A string theory for time dependent complex systems and its application to automatic decomposition

We introduce a string or world line formalism that provides a general description of time dependent complex systems. We show that it can be applied to mapping general problems onto both sequential and parallel computers. In principle it unifies the concepts of an optimizing compiler with that of parallel decomposition. We show that it reproduces and smoothly interpolates both our original load balancing methods for <italic>loosely synchronous</italic> problems and optimal communication and combining algorithms such as <italic>index</italic> and <italic>fold</italic>. We evaluate two explicit implementations, the <italic>neural_router</italic> and <italic>neural_accumulator</italic>, which use an optimizing neural network.