Paper Info
Title
GpH and Eden: Comparing two parallel functional languages on a Beowulf cluster
Abstract
We investigate two similar but contrasting parallel functi onal lan- guage designs: Eden and GPH. Both languages use the non-strict functional lan- guage Haskell as a core expression language, both are implemented as extensions of the high performance Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC), and both implemen- tations are available on the same distributed architecture : a Beowulf cluster. This allows an exceptionally pure comparison of the language design characteristics and their impact on parallel performance. The comparison is illustrated by two parallel symbolic computation bench- marks which expose differences in the communication, process creation, and work distribution mechanisms employed by Eden and GPH. Our results show that the explicit process model favoured by Eden gives good parallel performance for coarse-grained applications running on the Beowulf cluster. In comparison, the current G PH implementation of implicit parallelism yields poorer absolute speedup for these two applications. Further work is needed to determine whether this difference is an implementation artefact or a conseque nce of the different models employed in each case, though excessively fine thread granularity appears to be a contributing factor.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2000
Scottish Functional Programming Workshop
parallel functional language,beowulf cluster,process model,symbolic computation,functional language,distributed architecture
Field
DocType
ISBN
Implicit parallelism,Programming language,Functional programming,Computer science,Parallel computing,Symbolic computation,Thread (computing),Compiler,Implementation,Haskell,Speedup
Conference
1-84150-058-5
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
7
0.63
5
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Hans-Wolfgang Loidl134038.89
Ulrike Klusik21098.75
Kevin Hammond3181.98
Rita Loogen459842.21
Philip W. Trinder536987.36