GPH: RE: Concurrency and Haskell

[Phil Trinder]

Murray,

There are several parallel Haskell implementations: a survey of them has just 
appeared in Journal of Func. Prog Vols 4&5 (July & Sept 2002). Implementations 
are available for
o Eden http://www.mathematik.uni-marburg.de/inf/eden/
o GpH  http://www.cee.hw.ac.uk/~dsg/gph/

My group works on Glasgow parallel Haskell (GpH) which extends Haskell 98 with 
a parallel composition combinator. As Simon said the main implemntation,
GUM, buys portability using the relatively slow PVM communications library. 
This doesn't matter so much on distributed memory machines, and we've recently 
achieved some quite respectable results SunServer shared-memory machines.

Simon Marlowe developed an alternative SMP implementation of GpH a couple of 
years ago that may be more suitable for a Mosix platform, but I'm not sure of 
the status of that implementation now.

Phil

On Mon, 19 Aug 2002 18:04:44 +0100 Simon Peyton-Jones <simonpj@microsoft.com> 
wrote:

> Hi Murray
> 
> I'm catching up with my email backlog, but I didn't see a reply to your
> message, so I thought I'd reply.  The parallel-Haskell crew are at
> 	http://www.cee.hw.ac.uk/~dsg/gph/
> There's a mailing list that I'm ccing.
> 
> GHC can be built to run on a shared-memory multiprocessor, but we have
> not built and tested that for some time.  

Untrue - both Eden and GpH are currently used on SunServer SMPs.

> GPH is aimed more at
> distributed-memory machines, and has quite a bit more code layered on
> top of GHC.  Details on the GPH page above.  
> 
> Let me know if I can help.  It'd be great to get some more
> parallel-Haskell stuff going.
> 
> Simon
> 
> | A group of us at Brooklyn College (City University of New 
> | York) are in the latter stages of setting up a Mosix cluster 
> | that we would like to use for research on, among other 
> | things, parallel execution of Haskell code and run-time 
> | optimization of both automatic and programmed parallelization.
> | 
> | I would greatly appreciate hearing from anyone who can 
> | provide advice on 
> | an appropriate bibliography on the language implementation and past 
> | work in this area (other than the code in the Haskell compilers and 
> | libraries, of course), approaches, ongoing work, etc. 
> | 
> | Also, I would be most interested in hearing from anyone 
> | interested in joining our effort (no problems with remote 
> | access to the cluster by way of SSH), or making arrangements 
> | for cooperation in research in this area, although, of 
> | course, access to our equipment will be subject to approval 
> | from "higher authorities" (however, note that I really don't 
> | expect difficulty here, since our administration has already 
> | shown considerable interest in supporting the project).
> | 
> | Replies to the list will be read, but those who wish may mail 
> | me directly at mgross@dorsai.org. 
> | 
> | Thanks in advance for any replies. 
> | 
> | Murray Gross
> | Adj. Lecturer, Brooklyn College, 
> | City University of New York 
> | 
> | 
> | 
> | _______________________________________________
> | Haskell mailing list
> | Haskell@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
> | 
> 

--------------------------------------------------
Phil Trinder
Department of Computing and Electrical Engineering
Heriot Watt University
Riccarton
Edinburgh, EH14 4AS

E-mail: trinder@cee.hw.ac.uk
Teleph: +44 (0)131 451 3435
Depart: +44 (0)131 451 3328
Fasmly: +44 (0)131 451 3327
Intrnt: http://www.cee.hw.ac.uk/~trinder