Exploitation fine-grain parallelism in a combinator-based functional system

Abstract

A Scheme to extend the lazy functional language SASL with an eager evaluation operator that allows the programmer to selectively identify expressions to be evaluated eagerly is developed. D.A. Turner's (1979) abstraction and optimization algorithms are then modified so that the eagerness information will propagate through the combinator instruction set to the run-time parallel graph reducer. Simulation of simple benchmark programs shows this method to be very effective in exploiting fine-grain parallelism, even in irregular and unstructured operation. The evaluation is done on a virtual system. Despite the distributive nature of the combinator scheme, it is still unclear how to map the virtual machine into a physical architecture efficiently without seriously degrading the performance.<>