Low-pain, high-gain multicore programming in Haskell: coordinating irregular symbolic computations on multicore architectures

With the emergence of commodity multicore architectures, exploiting tightly-coupled parallelism has become increasingly important. Functional programming languages, such as Haskell, are, in principle, well placed to take advantage of this trend, offering the ability to easily identify large amounts of fine-grained parallelism. Unfortunately, obtaining real performance benefits has often proved hard to realise in practice. This paper reports on a new approach using middleware that has been constructed using the Eden parallel dialect of Haskell. Our approach is “low pain” in the sense that the programmer constructs a parallel program by inserting a small number of higher-order algorithmic skeletons at key points in the program. It is “high gain” in the sense that we are able to get good parallel speedups. Our approach is unusual in that we do not attempt to use shared memory directly, but rather coordinate parallel computations using a message-passing implementation. This appr...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: POPL
• Authors: Abdallah Al Zain, Kevin Hammond, Jost Berthold, Philip W. Trinder, Greg Michaelson, Mustafa Aswad
• Keywords: Computational Algebra, Eden Parallel Dialect, POPL 2009, Programming Languages, Shared Memory