MPI status?

John O'Donnell jtod@dcs.gla.ac.uk
Mon, 20 Aug 2001 10:57:25 +0100


Hi Duncan,

About your question concerning Haskell on the T3E...

> So my question is, what is the state of the art? What is the state of the
> MPI port? Does the alpha port work sufficiently well. One potential
> problem I can see is that I'm not sure gcc is avaliable on the T3E and I'm
> not sure how dependant ghc is upon the various GNU C extensions.

There are three (at least) quite distinct approaches to putting Haskell on
the T3E, and on related parallel machines.

  (1) Port GPH to the T3E, letting the runtime system handle the control
      of parallelism and communication.

  (2) Port ghc, and write the Haskell program in SPMD style (that is, the
      same executable is started on every processor in the group, just as
      with ordinary C+MPI).

  (3) Same as (2), but transform the final Haskell SPMD program to C+MPI,
      enabling it to be compiled and run using the standard tools.

In the first two approaches, there are a lot of difficulties with getting
Haskell running on the T3E.  This is partly due to the Alpha processor, but
there may also because difficulties due to the Cray operating system.

My colleagues and I are currently working on the approaches (2) and (3)
above.  We are also using a Cray T3E, but for the near future we'll have
to run the Haskell on clusters, since we can't generate code for the Cray.
The group consists of

  John O'Donnell,  Glasgow,   jtod@dcs.gla.ac.uk
  Thomas Rauber,   Halle,     rauber@informatik.uni-halle.de
  Gudula R"unger,  Chemnitz,  ruenger@informatik.tu-chemnitz.de

We are also very interested in getting a Cray port of Haskell, although
we're just as interested in ghc as gph.  After all, SPMD programming
uses sequential programming languages, not parallel ones!

Anybody making progress with an Alpha port of ghc, could you please
contact us?

Good luck with your project, Duncan!

John

> Hi all,
> 
> I'm doing an internship at Cray Inc this summer and I might get the
> opportunity of some computer time on a T3E machine. Now I am also a great
> Haskell fan and have been wondering about the possibility of getting
> parallel Haskell running on a real super-computer. I've read that someone
> is working on porting ghc's parallel features to an MPI implementation and
> also that someone recently got the alpha port working again.
> 
> In case you don't know a T3E is a distributed memory alpha based
> super-computer. It supports MPI & pthreads.
> 
> So my question is, what is the state of the art? What is the state of the
> MPI port? Does the alpha port work sufficiently well. One potential
> problem I can see is that I'm not sure gcc is avaliable on the T3E and I'm
> not sure how dependant ghc is upon the various GNU C extensions.
> 
> So, if I can get an account, I'll have untill the end of September to test
> anything anyone can give me.
> 
> You know they still program these machines in C, C++ & Fortran. Shocking!
> ;-)
> 
> Duncan
> 
> 
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