Parallelism is now a mainstream reality. Many chip manufactures are turning to multicore processor designs rather than scalar-oriented frequency increases as a way to get performance in their desktop, enterprise, and mobile processors. This endeavor is not likely to succeed long term if mainstream applications cannot be parallelized to take advantage of tens and eventually hundreds of hardware threads. Multicore architectures differ in significant ways from their shared memory predecessors. For example, the communication to compute bandwidth ratio is likely to be higher, which will positively impact performance. More generally, multicore architectures introduce several new dimensions of variability in both performance guarantees and architectural contracts, such as the memory model, that may not stabilize for several generations of product.

Programs written in functional, (constraint-)logic programming, and other forms of declarative programming languages, can greatly simplify parallel programming. Declarative programming restricts the use of side-effects and other forms of dependencies; declarative programming allows for a deterministic semantics even when the underlying implementation might be highly non-deterministic. In addition to simplifying programming declarative languages offer formal semantics that  simplify debugging and analyzing correctness.

DAMP 2010 is the fifth in a series of one-day workshops seeking to explore ideas in declarative programming language design that will greatly simplify programming for multicore architectures, and more generally for tightly coupled parallel architectures. The emphasis will be on functional and (constraint-)logic programming, but any declarative programming language ideas that aim to raise the level of abstraction are welcome. DAMP seeks to gather together researchers in declarative approaches to parallel programming and to foster cross fertilization across different approaches.