[Haskell-cafe] Re: MPI

[Don Stewart]

bos:
> On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 10:43 AM, FFT <fft1976 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>     > Are MPI bindings still the best way of using Haskell on Beowulf
>     > clusters? It's my feeling that the bindings stagnated, or are they
>     > just very mature?
> 
> 
> MPI itself hasn't changed in 14 years, so it's not exactly a moving target.
> (There's an MPI 2.0, but its most visible changes are not really usable.)
> 
> 
>     What's the story with distributed memory multiprocessing? Are Haskell
>     programmers uninterested in it, or are things other than MPI used with
>     it?
> 
> 
> The ratio of work to payoff is unfortunately very high, so it seems to have
> been abandoned as a topic of fruitful research.


Though note the new paper for ICPP:

    "In this paper, we investigate the differences and tradeoffs
    imposed by two parallel Haskell dialects running on multicore
    machines. GpH and Eden are both constructed using the
    highly-optimising sequential GHC compiler, and share thread
    scheduling, and other elements, from a common code base. The GpH
    implementation investigated here uses a physically-shared heap,
    which should be well-suited to multicore architectures. In contrast,
    the Eden implementation adopts an approach that has been designed
    for use on distributed-memory parallel machines
    "

    http://www-fp.cs.st-and.ac.uk/~kh/mainICPP09.pdf

--   Don