[Haskell-cafe] GSoC Project Proposal: Parallel Profiling Tools for GHC.

[Donnie Jones]

Hello Everyone,GSoC Project: Parallel Profiling Tools for GHC.
Student: Donnie Jones
Mentor: Simon Marlow
Project based upon suggestion by Simon Marlow:
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/ticket/1559

Overview:
For Haskell there are currently no tools to investigate the performance of
parallel programs.  This project would extend the Haskell compiler GHC to
support profiling of parallel programs.

Parallel programs are inherently difficult to analyze and the prevalence of
multi-core processors has increased the need for tools to facilitate gaining
performance from parallelism.  The ability to profile parallel programs in
GHC could lead to improvements in GHC's RTS, and insights into writing
parallel Haskell code.

Goals:
  * Investigate the use of the GranSim framework for parallel profiling in
GHC
    i. Decide what is needed to commit the GranSim port to the GHC tree
    i. Build additional profiling tools upon the GranSim framework

  * Testing of performance hit accrued from parallel profiling
    i. Investigate improving performance, possible modifications to GranSim
port

  * Construct tests to measure the performance improvements of parallel
programs
    i. Building benchmarks for parallel programs, related to ticket:
       http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/ticket/1544

  * Improve upon GranSim visualization of profiles to clarify parallel
profiling
    i. Possibly add new visualization profiles, if time allows

I am sure that further details will need to be developed with the help of
Simon Marlow; however, I am unsure if some of these details can be defined
without first investigating the potential use of GranSim.

I look forward to your feedback.
Thank you.
__
Donnie Jones
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