Program transformations and skeletons: formal derivation of parallel programs

The paper describes-from a software engineering perspective-a framework for the formal development of parallel algorithms on arbitrary architectures. The algorithms are synthesised in a transformational way, i.e. by applying correctness preserving rewrite rules to a formal specification. The architectures are modelled by skeletons-higher order functions that represent elementary computations on a certain architecture. It is shown that the combination of transformational programming and skeletons stimulates the reuse of program derivations. Furthermore, interskeleton transformations will provide the means for architecture independent program development