Programming Manifolds

Abstract

Many programming domains involve the manipulation of values distributed through a manifold - examples include sensor networks, smart materials, and biofilms. This paper describes a programming semantics for manifolds based on the amorphous medium abstraction, which places a computational device at every point in the manifold. This abstraction enables the creation of programs that automatically scale to networks of different size and device density. This semantics is currently implemented in our language Proto and compiles for execution on Mica2 Motes and several other platforms.