Comparing and Optimising Parallel Haskell Implementations for Multicore Machines

—In this paper, we investigate the differences and tradeoffs imposed by two parallel Haskell dialects running on multicore machines. GpH and Eden are both constructed using the highly-optimising sequential GHC compiler, and share thread scheduling, and other elements, from a common code base. The GpH implementation investigated here uses a physically-shared heap, which should be well-suited to multicore architectures. In contrast, the Eden implementation adopts an approach that has been designed for use on distributed-memory parallel machines: a system of multiple, independent heaps (one per core), with inter-core communication handled by message-passing rather than through shared heap cells. We report two main results. Firstly, we report on the effect of a number of optimisations that we applied to the shared-memory GpH implementation in order to address some performance issues that were revealed by our testing: for example, we implemented a work-stealing approach to task allocation...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ICPPW
• Authors: Jost Berthold, Simon Marlow, Kevin Hammond, Abdallah Al Zain
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, GpH Implementation, ICPPW 2009, Shared-heap Gph Implementation, Shared-memory Gph Implementation