Title
Parallel concurrent ML
Abstract
AbstractConcurrent ML (CML) is a high-level message-passing language that supports the construction of first-class synchronous abstractions called events. This mechanism has proven quite effective over the years and has been incorporated in a number of other languages. While CML provides a concurrent programming model, its implementation has always been limited to uniprocessors. This limitation is exploited in the implementation of the synchronization protocol that underlies the event mechanism, but with the advent of cheap parallel processing on the desktop (and laptop), it is time for Parallel CML.Parallel implementations of CML-like primitives for Java and Haskell exist, but build on high-level synchronization constructs that are unlikely to perform well. This paper presents a novel, parallel implementation of CML that exploits a purpose-built optimistic concurrency protocol designed for both correctness and performance on shared-memory multiprocessors. This work extends and completes an earlier protocol that supported just a strict subset of CML with synchronization on input, but not output events. Our main contributions are a model-checked reference implementation of the protocol and two concrete implementations. This paper focuses on Manticore's functional, continuation-based implementation but briefly discusses an independent, thread-based implementation written in C# and running on Microsoft's stock, parallel runtime. Although very different in detail, both derive from the same design. Experimental evaluation of the Manticore implementation reveals good performance, dispite the extra overhead of multiprocessor synchronization.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1145/1631687.1596588
SIGPLAN
Keywords
Field
DocType
general terms languages,performance keywords concurrency,concurrency,parallelism,message passing,parallel processing,model checking
Synchronization,Programming language,Parallel algorithm,Computer science,Concurrency,Parallel computing,Reference implementation,Concurrent ML,Haskell,Concurrent computing,Optimistic concurrency control
Conference
Volume
Issue
ISSN
44
9
0362-1340
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
14
0.69
14
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
John H. Reppy189984.36
Claudio V. Russo2816.07
Yingqi Xiao3623.13