28,580 research outputs found
Intel Concurrent Collections for Haskell
Intel Concurrent Collections (CnC) is a parallel programming model in which a network of steps (functions) communicate through message-passing as well as a limited form of shared memory. This paper describes a new implementation of CnC for Haskell. Compared to existing parallel programming models for Haskell, CnC occupies a useful point in the design space: pure and deterministic like Evaluation Strategies, but more explicit about granularity and the structure of the parallel computation, which affords the programmer greater control over parallel performance. We present results on 4, 8, and 32-core machines demonstrating parallel speedups over 20x on non-trivial benchmarks
A Case Study in Coordination Programming: Performance Evaluation of S-Net vs Intel's Concurrent Collections
We present a programming methodology and runtime performance case study
comparing the declarative data flow coordination language S-Net with Intel's
Concurrent Collections (CnC). As a coordination language S-Net achieves a
near-complete separation of concerns between sequential software components
implemented in a separate algorithmic language and their parallel orchestration
in an asynchronous data flow streaming network. We investigate the merits of
S-Net and CnC with the help of a relevant and non-trivial linear algebra
problem: tiled Cholesky decomposition. We describe two alternative S-Net
implementations of tiled Cholesky factorization and compare them with two CnC
implementations, one with explicit performance tuning and one without, that
have previously been used to illustrate Intel CnC. Our experiments on a 48-core
machine demonstrate that S-Net manages to outperform CnC on this problem.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, 1 table, accepted for PLC 2014 worksho
Resource Usage Protocols for Iterators
We discuss usage protocols for iterator objects that prevent concurrent modifications of the underlying collection while iterators are in progress. We formalize these protocols in Java-like object interfaces, enriched with separation logic contracts. We present examples of iterator clients and proofs that they adhere to the iterator protocol, as well as examples of iterator implementations and proofs that they implement the iterator interface
Probabilistic Graphical Models on Multi-Core CPUs using Java 8
In this paper, we discuss software design issues related to the development
of parallel computational intelligence algorithms on multi-core CPUs, using the
new Java 8 functional programming features. In particular, we focus on
probabilistic graphical models (PGMs) and present the parallelisation of a
collection of algorithms that deal with inference and learning of PGMs from
data. Namely, maximum likelihood estimation, importance sampling, and greedy
search for solving combinatorial optimisation problems. Through these concrete
examples, we tackle the problem of defining efficient data structures for PGMs
and parallel processing of same-size batches of data sets using Java 8
features. We also provide straightforward techniques to code parallel
algorithms that seamlessly exploit multi-core processors. The experimental
analysis, carried out using our open source AMIDST (Analysis of MassIve Data
STreams) Java toolbox, shows the merits of the proposed solutions.Comment: Pre-print version of the paper presented in the special issue on
Computational Intelligence Software at IEEE Computational Intelligence
Magazine journa
Characterizing traits of coordination
How can one recognize coordination languages and technologies? As this report
shows, the common approach that contrasts coordination with computation is
intellectually unsound: depending on the selected understanding of the word
"computation", it either captures too many or too few programming languages.
Instead, we argue for objective criteria that can be used to evaluate how well
programming technologies offer coordination services. Of the various criteria
commonly used in this community, we are able to isolate three that are strongly
characterizing: black-box componentization, which we had identified previously,
but also interface extensibility and customizability of run-time optimization
goals. These criteria are well matched by Intel's Concurrent Collections and
AstraKahn, and also by OpenCL, POSIX and VMWare ESX.Comment: 11 pages, 3 table
A Programming Language for Web Service Development
There is now widespread acceptance of Web services and service-oriented architectures. But despite the agreement on key Web services standards there remain many challenges. Programming environments based on WSDL support go some way to facilitating Web service development. However Web services fundamentally rely on XML and Schema, not on contemporary programming language type systems such as those of Java or .NET. Moreover, Web services are based on a messaging paradigm and hence bring forward the traditional problems of messaging systems including concurrency control and message correlation. It is easy to write simple synchronous Web services using traditional programming languages; however more realistic scenarios are surprisingly difficult to implement. To alleviate these issues we propose a programming language which directly supports Web service development. The language leverages XQuery for native XML processing, supports implicit message correlation and has high level join calculus-style concurrency control. We illustrate the features of the language through a motivating example
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