[Haskell-beginners] Performance of parallel mergesort

[Jon Harrop]

On Saturday 26 December 2009 18:00:49 Tommy M. McGuire wrote:
> Antoine Latter wrote:
> >> Here's a paste-bin link for the code in question:
> >
> > http://hpaste.org/fastcgi/hpaste.fcgi/view?id=14871#a14871
>
> I am not familiar with Control.Parallel at all, so someone please correct
> me if I'm wrong....
>
> ...but that parallel mergesort looks very wrong to me.
>
> In the first place, the split is using the length of the list, which is
> going to force the spine of the list, leaving a bazillion thunks unless the
> runtime will evaluate the numerical value at each element.
>
> More importantly, it seems to be running the forcelist in parallel with the
> merge; forcelist is not going to do anything useful after the first pass
> over each element, and the merge has a data dependency on the split
> sub-lists, which is going to limit parallelism quite a bit.
>
> Am I wrong here?

The parallelism is obviously not obtaining any real speedup so something is 
wrong. But can anyone fix it?

-- 
Dr Jon Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?e