[Haskell-cafe] Bulk Synchronous Parallel

[Aaron D. Ball]

On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 14:05, Jason Dusek <jason.dusek at gmail.com> wrote:

>  One approach is some compiler "magic" that provides you with an RTS
>  that can communicate with other RTSen over TCP and chunks the computation
>  "appropriately".

The approaches to Haskell multi-host parallelism I've seen all seem to
be (a) dead and (b) overly complicated, which I can't help but suspect
are related.

I don't need a tool that automatically figures out how to distribute
any workload in an intelligent way and handles all the communication
for me.  If I have the basic building block, which is the ability to
serialize a Haskell expression with its dependencies and read them
into another Haskell instance where I can evaluate them, I can handle
the other pieces, which are

- passing strings back and forth in whatever way is convenient
- deciding how to divide up my workload.

In the Ruby universe, DRb combines the serialization and "passing
strings around" job and lets me figure out how to divide up the work,
and it would be delightful if there were something similarly simple in
the Haskell world.