[Haskell-cafe] ANN: GHC-7.4.2-Eden - Parallel Haskell on multicore and cluster systems

[Eden - Functional parallel Programming (Mischa Dieterle)]

We are happy to announce a new release of Eden, a parallel extension of
Haskell. The release comprises:

* The GHC-7.4.2-Eden compiler: GHC-7.4.2 extended with the Eden parallel
runtime system.
* The Eden modules: a library defining the Eden language constructs.
* The Eden skeleton library: a comprehensive library with common task
and data parallel patterns.
* The Eden trace viewer EdenTV: an visualisation and analysis tool for
eventlogs of parallel program runs.

All resources are available via: http://www.mathematik.uni-marburg.de/~eden

Eden extends Haskell with a small set of syntactic constructs for
explicit process specification and creation.  While providing enough
control to implement parallel algorithms efficiently, it frees the
programmer from the tedious task of managing low-level details by
introducing automatic process handling, synchronisation and
communication (via head-strict lazy lists).
Eden is tailored for distributed systems but works equally well on
multicore architectures. Processes work within disjoint address spaces
and do not share any data. This simplifies Eden's implementation as
there is no need for global garbage collection.

A tutorial is available from
http://www.mathematik.uni-marburg.de/~eden/paper/edenCEFP.pdf

The compiler release includes binary packages for Linux and Windows, and
a source distribution, available from
http://www.mathematik.uni-marburg.de/~eden/?content=down_eden_7_4&navi=down
 
Other features:
- Extensions for GHC's event logging support.
- Built-in serialisation of Haskell data structures (orthogonal to
evaluation), see "Orthogonal Serialisation for Haskell", available from
http://www.diku.dk/hjemmesider/ansatte/berthold/jbpubl.html
- Optimised local communication.
- Stand-alone version for multicore, using middleware MPI or PVM for
clusters.

Eden libraries and tools are available separately from hackage:

- Eden modules: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/edenmodules (already
included in the Eden compiler)
- Eden skeleton library: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/edenskel
- EdenTV: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/edentv (uses gtk2hs and glade)

When built using a standard GHC, the packages will produce a threaded
simulation of Eden.