Durra: A Task-Level Description Language Reference Manual (Version 2)

Abstract: Durra is a language designed to support the development of large-grained parallel programming applications. These applications are oftencomputation-intensive, or have real-time requirements that require efficientconcurrent execution of multiple tasks, devoted to specific pieces of the appli-cation. During execution time the application tasks run on possibly separateprocessors, and communicate with each other by sending messages of differ-ent types across various communication links. The application developer isresponsible for prescribing a way to manage all of these resources. We callthis prescription atask-level application description. It describes the tasks tobe executed, the possible assignments of processes to processors, the datapaths between the processors, and the intermediate queues required to storethe data as they move from source to destination processes. Durra is atask-level description language,a notation in which to write these applicationdescriptions.This document is a revised version of the original reference manual [2]. It de-scribes the syntax and semantics of the language and incorporates all the lan-guage changes introduced as a result of our experiences writing task and ap-plication descriptions in Durra. A companion document,Durra: A Task-LevelDescription Language User’s Manual[7], describes how to use the compiler,runtime environment, and support tools.

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