GUM: a portable parallel implementation of Haskell
- PW Trinder ,
- K Hammond ,
- JS Mattson ,
- AS Partridge ,
- Simon Peyton Jones
ACM Conference on Programming Languages Design and Implementation (PLDI'96)
GUM is portable, parallel implementation of the Haskell functional language which has been publicly released with version 0.26 of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). GUM is message-based, and portability is facilitated by using the PVM communications-harness available on most multi-processors, including shared-memory and distributed-memory machines. For example GUM is available by FTP for a Sun SPARCserver multiprocessor and for a networks of Sun SPARC workstations.
High message-latency in distributed machines is ameliorated by sending messages asynchronously, and by sending large packets of related data in each message. Initial performance figures demonstrate absolute speedups relative to the best sequential compiler technology. To improve the performance of a parallel Haskell program GUM provides tools for monitoring and visualising the behaviour of threads and of PEs during execution.