Advice wanted on parallel processing

[Colin Paul Adams]

I've just managed to build ghc 6.11 (Thanks Simon).

I did this for two reasons, one of which is I want to try to improve
the speed of the AI for the Chu Shogi program I am writing by making
use of parallel processing. I have a 4-core Xeon runing Fedora Linux
10 (AMD64).

I have a repeatable scenario for timings. With ghc 6.10.1, no threaded
runtime, the computer takes 51 or 52 seconds to move (experimental
variation up to 1.2 seconds).

With ghc 6.11, it takes the same time.

If I switch on the threaded runtime, then it rises slightly (perhaps
not significantly - I measure 53-54 seconds). With 2, 3 or 4
processors, I measured (one-off, so not reliable) 65, 55 and 58
seconds respectively.

Well, that doesn't really matter, provided I can get the time back
with interest by exploiting parallelism. My first thought for an
"easy" win is the move generator. At present I have this code:

-- | Generate all legal moves from state.
--
-- The best moves (according to some heuristic) should come first
generate_moves :: (Non_interactive_state, Maybe Move) -> [(Non_interactive_state, Maybe Move)]
generate_moves (state, _) =
    let colour = case is_black_to_play state of
                   True -> Black
                   False -> White
        pieces' = all_pieces_of_colour (board state) colour
        unsorted = concatMap (generate_moves_for_piece state) pieces'
        sorted = sortBy best_move unsorted
        moves = mapMaybe new_move sorted
    in {-trace (concat (intersperse "\n" (map (print_move . fromJust . snd) moves)))-} moves
        where new_move mv = 
                  case update_from_move (state, Nothing) mv of
                    Nothing -> Nothing
                    Just (st', Nothing) -> Just (st', Just mv)


and my idea was to run the call to generate_moves_for_piece in
parallel over the pieces' list. I thought I could do that simply by
replacing concatMap with parFlatMap, but discovered I need to supply
an extra argument - a Strategy. Not knowing what this should be
(where's the best place to read up on this?) I tried specifying rwhnf.

My timings then are:

-N1 83 seconds
-N2 57 seconds
-N3 58 seconds
-N4 60 seconds

so a complete failure.

Where should I go from here?
-- 
Colin Adams
Preston Lancashire