Classical Coordination Mechanisms in the Chemical Model

Originally, the chemical model of computation has been proposed as a simple and elegant parallel programming paradigm. Data is seen as “molecules” and computation as “chemical reactions”: if some molecules satisfy a predefined reaction condition, they are replaced by the “product” of the reaction. When no reaction is possible, a normal form is reached and the program terminates. In this paper, we describe classical coordination mechanisms and parallel programming models in the chemical setting. All these examples put forward the simplicity and expressivity of the chemical paradigm. We pay a particular attention to the chemical description of the simple and successful parallel computation model known as Kahn Process Networks. ∗INRIA/IRISA, Universite de Rennes 1, Campus de Beaulieu, 35042 Rennes Cedex, France, {jbanatre,yradenac}@irisa.fr †INRIA Rhone-Alpes, 655, avenue de l’Europe, 38330 Montbonnot, France Pascal.Fradet@inria.fr