GUM - A PORTABLE PARALLEL IMPLEMENTATION OF HASKELL

GUM is a portable, parallel implementation of the Haskell functional l anguage. Despite sustained research interest in parallel functional pr ogramming, GUM is one of the first such systems to be made publicly av ailable. GUM is message-based, and portability is facilitated by using the PVM communications harness that is available on many multi-proces sors. As a result, GUM is available for both shared-memory (Sun SPARCs erver multiprocessors) and distributed-memory (networks of workstation s) architectures. The high message-latency of distributed machines is ameliorated by sending messages asynchronously and by sending large pa ckets of related data in each message. Initial performance figures dem onstrate absolute speedups relative to the best sequential compiler te chnology. To improve the performance of a parallel Haskell program GUM provides tools for monitoring and visualising the behaviour of thread s and of processors during execution.