Automated Generation of BSP Automata

Bulk-Synchronous Parallel (BSP) is a bridging model between abstract execution and concrete parallel architectures that retains enough information to model performance scalability. In order to model BSP program executions, Hains adapted the theory of finite automata to the BSP paradigm by introducing BSP automata [12].

In the initial description of the theory, BSP automata had to be explicitly defined as structured sets of states and transitions. The lack of a clean and efficient algorithm for generating them from regular expressions would have prevented this theory from being used in practice. To alleviate this problem we introduce in this paper an algorithm that generates a BSP automaton recognizing a BSP language defined by a BSP regular expression. The main practical use of BSP automata developed in this paper is the parallelization of finite state automata with an explicit distribution and a performance model, that enable parallel matching of regular expressions. Secondarily, BSP regular expressions provide a convenient structure for automatic code generation of imperative BSP programs that is also developed in this paper.