PAEAN : portable and scalable runtime support for parallel Haskell dialects
Date
2016Grant ID
n/a
FP&-ICT-2011-7
644235
EP/G055181/1
EP/F030657/1
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Abstract
Over time, several competing approaches to parallel Haskell programming have emerged. Different approaches support parallelism at various different scales, ranging from small multicores to massively parallel high-performance computing systems. They also provide varying degrees of control, ranging from completely implicit approaches to ones providing full programmer control. Most current designs assume a shared memory model at the programmer, implementation and hardware levels. This is, however, becoming increasingly divorced from the reality at the hardware level. It also imposes significant unwanted runtime overheads in the form of garbage collection synchronisation etc. What is needed is an easy way to abstract over the implementation and hardware levels, while presenting a simple parallelism model to the programmer. The PArallEl shAred Nothing runtime system design aims to provide a portable and high-level shared-nothing implementation platform for parallel Haskell dialects. It abstracts over major issues such as work distribution and data serialisation, consolidating existing, successful designs into a single framework. It also provides an optional virtual shared-memory programming abstraction for (possibly) shared-nothing parallel machines, such as modern multicore/manycore architectures or cluster/cloud computing systems. It builds on, unifies and extends, existing well-developed support for shared-memory parallelism that is provided by the widely used GHC Haskell compiler. This paper summarises the state-of-the-art in shared-nothing parallel Haskell implementations, introduces the PArallEl shAred Nothing abstractions, shows how they can be used to implement three distinct parallel Haskell dialects, and demonstrates that good scalability can be obtained on recent parallel machines.
Citation
Berthold , J , Loidl , H-W & Hammond , K 2016 , ' PAEAN : portable and scalable runtime support for parallel Haskell dialects ' , Journal of Functional Programming , vol. 26 , e10 . https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956796816000010
Publication
Journal of Functional Programming
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0956-7968Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2016, Cambridge University Press. This work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at journals.cambridge.org / https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0956796816000010
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