Parallel Programs (Multicellular Organisms)

It has already been mentioned that the design of Cosmos was guided by an analogy to cellular biological organisms (Section 4.1). In order to model not just unicellular organisms, but also multicellular ones, Cosmos has been designed to support parallel programs--an analogy to multicellularity. Furthermore, it allows programs to dynamically create new parallel processes as they are running, as an analogy to the growth of a multicellular organism from a single celled origin.

All programs in Cosmos are instances of the Organism^4.13 class. An Organism may contain one or more Cells (each Cell being essentially an individual process). There is therefore no fundamental difference in the representation of serial and parallel programs; a serial program is just an Organism which has only one Cell, while a parallel program is an Organism with more than one Cell.