An overview of the Flagship system

Abstract

The Flagship Project1 was a research collaboration between the University of Manchester, Imperial College London and International Computers Ltd. The project was unusual in that it aimed to produce a complete computing system based on a declarative programming style. Three areas of a declarative system were addressed: (1) programming languages and programming environments; (2) the machine architecture and computational models; and (3) the software environment. This overview paper discusses each of these areas, the intention being to present the project as a coherent whole.

The automated transformation of abstract specifications of numerical algorithms into efficient array processor implementations

“…Many computer systems have been developed specifically to support the parallel execution of functional programming languages [24,40,45,64,48,38,53]. Special hardware that supports combinatoric graph reduction offers the possibility of a radical change in the relative performances of functional and imperative languages, thereby reducing the need for the construction of an imperative im-plementation of a functional specification.…”