Concurrent ML (CML) is a high-level message-passing language that supports the construction of first-class synchronous abstractions called events. This mechanism has proven quite effective over the years and has been incorporated in a number of other languages. While CML provides a concurrent programming model, its implementation has always been limited to uniprocessors. This limitation is exploited in the implementation of the synchronization protocol that underlies the event mechanism, but with the advent of cheap parallel processing on the desktop (and laptop), it is time for Parallel CML. Parallel implementations of CML-like primitives for Java and Haskell exist, but build on high-level synchronization constructs that are unlikely to perform well. This paper presents a novel, parallel implementation of CML that exploits a purpose-built optimistic concurrency protocol designed for both correctness and performance on shared-memory multiprocessors. This work extends and completes an ...
John H. Reppy, Claudio V. Russo, Yingqi Xiao