GpH: An Architecture-independent Functional Language
Phil W. Trinder, E. D. Barry, M. Kei Davis, Kevin L Hammond, Sahalu Balarabe Junaidu, Ulrike Klusic, Hans‐Wolfgang Loidl, Simon Jones · 1998
In principle, pure functional languages promise straightforward architecture-independent parallelism. We investigate the validity of this claim in the context of our highly-portable implementation of an implicitly-parallel functional language: the GUM implementation of Glasgow Parallel Haskell (GpH). We discuss architecture independence at two levels: lowlevel (i.e. the implementation) and high-level (i.e. the programmer). Low-level architecture independence is achieved by chosing a message-passing model for GUM, and implementing it using portable C and a widely-supported message-passing library like PVM. In fact GUM is largely independent of the message-passing library, and has been adapted to use MPI and the CM-5 CMMD libraries as well as PVM. As a result, GUM is easily ported, and is currently available on seven platforms including shared-memory machines, distributed-memory machines, and networks of workstations. We provide indicative measurements of how efficient and effective our...