Buckwheat: graph reduction on a shared-memory multiprocessor

Abstract

Buckwheat is a working implementation of a functional language on the Encore Multimax multiprocessor. It is based on a heterogeneous abstract machine model consisting of both graph reduction and stack oriented execution. Buckwheat consists of two major components: a compiler and a run-time system. The task of the compiler is to detect the exploitable parallelism in programs written in ALFL, a conventional functional language. The run-time system supports processor scheduling, dynamic typing and storage management. In this paper we describe the organization, execution model, and scheduling policies of the Buckwheat run-time system. A large number of experiments have been performed and we present the results.