PAEAN: Portable Runtime Support for Physically-Shared-Nothing Architectures in Parallel Haskell Dialects

PAEAN is a new high-level, portable runtime support library for supporting shared-nothing implementations of parallel Haskell dialects. PAEAN abstracts over key issues such as task and data serialisation, providing a virtual shared-memory programming abstraction for (possibly) shared-nothing parallel machines, such as modern multicore architectures or cloud computing systems. It builds on and extends existing well-developed support for shared-memory parallelism that is provided by the widely-used GHC Haskell compiler. In contrast to other approaches, which delegate much system programming activity to the (functional) application programmer, PAEAN allows high-level support to be provided, including automatic task offloading and load balancing, distributed garbage collection and other high-level features. This paper introduces these features, shows how they can be implemented in two parallel Haskell dialects, and demonstrates that good scalability can be obtained on recent parallel machines.