Please note: We have a version of GUM in which PVM has been replaced by
direct network communication. However, this project has been idle since
the appearance of GHC-6, and I have not been able to get a binary of the
parallel version (which is based on GHC-5) to compile itself.
Murray Gross
Brooklyn College,
City University of New York
On Thu, 17 Dec 2009, Simon Marlow wrote:
On 16/12/2009 19:21, Scott A. Waterman wrote:
It looks like there was a recent hackathon focusing on implementing
distributed haskell.
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/HackPar
I feel there is quite a bit of latent interest in the subject here,
but relatively little active development (compared to erlang, clojure,
etc.)
Can anyone involved give a quick overview (or pointers to one)?
It would be good to hear what directions people are taking, and why,
and where it's going.
The main directions are:
GUM, which was one of the first parallel implementations of Haskell many
years ago [1]. The programming API is the same as GHC has: par/pseq and
strategies (indeed this API was invented in the context of GUM, we just
re-used it in GHC).
GUM uses PVM message passing to implement a distributed heap, and can run on
clusters of machines or a multicore, or a combination of the two. GUM has in
the past been integrated with GHC, but has sufferred from a lack of
development effort so has rotted in recent years. Efforts are now underway
to get it working with GHC HEAD again.
Eden [2] also uses PVM, but does not have a distributed heap. It's
implementation is much simpler, and the API is rather more explicit than
par/seq and strategies. Eden has been tracking GHC more closely than GUM,
but it's still a research project and there's little effort available to make
releases.
Neither of these are really what you'd call "Distributed Haskell", they are
implementations of parallel variants of Haskell running on distributed
hardware. There was a Distributed Haskell project, but it is not active at
the moment [3].
Cheers,
Simon
[1] GUM: a portable parallel implementation of Haskell
http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~dsg/gph/papers/abstracts/gum.html
[2] Parallel functional programming in Eden
Journal of Functional Programming (2005), 15
[3] http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~dsg/gdh/
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