Constructing Efficient Eden programs for High-Latency Distributed Systems

Speaker: Ulrike Klusik

Time: Wednesday 18th May 2000, at 15.15

Place: Room 2.33

Abstract:

In a programming language, parallelism is in general hard to express in an elegant and comprehensive way. Functional languages provide the necessary high level of abstraction, promoting highly expressive parallel programs. The parallel functioanl language Eden extends Haskell by process abstractions and instantiations for the explicit definition of process networks. Eden process systems are distributed, i.e. there exists no shared memory or global address space. processes communiate via channels modeled as head-strict lazy lists. But on the other hand, parallelism is all about efficiency. Conventional parallel machines often have slow network connections and fast processors, hindering the efficient execution of inherently fine-grained parallel functional programs. In this paper we show how to tackle this problem in Eden and present speedups for four simple process schemes which support the development of Eden programs.