[Haskell] Implicit parallel functional programming

[A. Al Zain]

> paul at theV.net wrote:
>
>> Yes, today we have two-processors on a core, and uni-processor
>> speed bump is unlikely to overshadow the effort of parallelism
>> like it did 20 years ago. But we are also beginning to see
>> applications requiring thousands of machines to run. The so
>> called grid computing maybe a just another buzzword, but the
>> reality is that grand applications just won't scale on today's
>> two-processor core, and explicit parallelism often requires
>> a prior knowledge on how to split the program, which is hardly
>> scalable except some simple cases.
>
> Re: the grid buzzword
>
> Grid computing, as seen by organisations like the GGF and mainstream
> toolkits such as Globus, is not about parallelisation, but instead
> simply about access to shared resources. That is, they're interested in
> providing tools and standards for remote, shared access to software
> services, data and hardware (and providing useful features like
> security, authorisation, authentication, monitoring and reliability). Of
> course peer-to-peer compute systems are more about parallelisation, but
> they tend to be mostly commercial/proprietary rather than standardised
> at the moment.
>
> The Grid will be more like an enhanced version of the current web. But
> Haskell could get involved there too, especially if styles such as web
> programming with continuations prove useful in future generations of web
> services architectures.

At Heriot Watt University, we are working on Grid-GUM, a version of
Glasgow Parallel Haskell that uses Globus Toolkit as a middle-ware and
MPICH-G2 for communication. In our paper under consideration for
TFP'04 we report experiments with Grid-GUM on various collections of
clusters, including clusters in Edinburgh (UK), Galashiels (UK), and
Munich (Germany).

The results show that for clusters with a low-latency Grid-GUM gives
good speedups for most large programs. For clusters with a
high-latency interconnect programs that do little communication still
give good performance, but others don't. We have designed a revised
runtime system to adapt to Grid-based architectures, Grid-GUM2, and
initial experiments show good results (paper submitted to
PAPP'05). Papers also available on request.

More info on current GpH work from
  http://www.haskell.org/communities/05-2004/html/report.html

Abyd Al Zain & Phil Trinder

>
> Amanda
>
> --
> Amanda Clare  http://users.aber.ac.uk/afc/
> Dept. of Computer Science, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, SY23 3DB
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