Summary

This section has presented the outline of the communications language presented in this thesis. The language includes many features that are necessary to support efficient compilation to a reprogrammable scheduled router:

• high-level operators to capture useful semantics;
• grouping constructs to capture known timing relationship among operators, and facilitate creation of communication phases;
• a pseudo-runtime-value construct that indicates data-dependent values and can express known constraints for those values;
• ready extensibility;
• and portability to a range of routing substrates.

The limitations of the abstraction, while clear, do not seem sufficient to prevent the language from being used to generate efficient communications code in many cases; and they do not detract from the language's utility as a research vehicle.