Formally Specifying and Analyzing a Parallel Virtual Machine for Lazy Functional Languages Using Maude

Pure lazy functional languages are a promising programming paradigm for harvesting massive parallelism, as their abstraction features and lack of side effects support the development of modular programs without unneeded serialization. We give a new formal message passing semantics for implicitly parallel execution of a lazy functional programming language, based on the intensional transformation that converts programs in functional style to a form that can be executed in a dataflow paradigm. We use rewriting logic to define the semantics of our parallel virtual machine and we use the Maude tool to formally analyze our model. We also briefly discuss a prototype parallel implementation of our model in Erlang.