GpH and Eden: Comparing Two Parallel Functional Languages on a Beowulf Cluster

We investigate two similar but contrasting parallel functional language designs: Eden and GPH. Both languages use the non-strict functional language Haskell as a core expression language, both are implemented as extensions of the high performance Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC), and both implementations 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 compariso

High-level Process Control in Eden

High-level control of parallel process behaviour simplifies the development of parallel software substantially by freeing the programmer from low-level process management and coordination details. The latter are handled by a sophisticated runtime system which controls program execution. In this paper we look behind the scenes and show how the enormous gap between high-level parallel language constructs and their low-level implementation has been bridged in the implementation of the parallel functional language Eden. The main idea has been to specify the process control in a functional language and to restrict the extensions of the low-level runtime system to a few selected primitive operations

Eden -- Parallel Functional Programming with Haskell

Eden is a parallel functional programming language which extends Haskell with constructs for the definition and instantiation of parallel processes. Processes evaluate function applications remotely in parallel. The programmer has control over process granularity, data distribution, communication topology, and evaluation site, but need not manage synchronisation and data exchange between processes. The latter are performed by the parallel runtime system through implicit communication channels, transparent to the programmer. Common and sophisticated parallel communication patterns and topologies, so-called algorithmic skeletons, are provided as higher-order functions in a user-extensible skeleton library written in Eden. Eden is geared toward distributed settings, i.e. processes do not share any data, but can equally well be used on multicore systems. This tutorial gives an up-to-date introduction into Eden’s programming methodology based on algorithmic skeletons, its language constructs, and its layered implementation on top of the Glasgo