Implementing functional languages to exploit locality
Rich Wolski, John Feo, D.C. Cann · OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) · 1991
In the quest for high performance, no obstacle has been as persistent or unyielding as memory latency. It was hoped that dataflow's fine-grain asynchronous model of execution might defeat the memory latency problem. Unable to realize efficient fine-grain systems, the dataflow community is now studying medium-grain and coarse-grain implementations which, like conventional execution models, suffer the effects of memory latency. In this paper, we describe a functional language implementation that automatically exploits locality on cache-coherent multiprocessors. Our system achieves performance improvements reaching 20% for some programs. This study lends further support to the superiority of the functional paradigm for parallel processing. 11 refs., 9 figs.