The Fast and The Dangerous: Safer Parallel Programming with Types

Parallel programming is notoriously difficult. Years of research had led to a plethora of models and languages for parallel programming, yet the majority of the scientific computing community is stuck with Message-Passing Interface, a standard designed 20 years ago. MPI is known for its robustness but not for its user-friendliness, and communication errors are often hidden in plain sight. Session Types is a formal system that uses types to abstract interaction patterns and making sure message-passing communication do not go wrong, combining session types and MPI seems a sensible way to make parallel programming but is it really that simple? In this talk, I will introduce session types in the context of parallel programming and what it brings to making parallel programming easier and safer.