Hi Duncan, About your question concerning Haskell on the T3E...

So my question is, what is the state of the art? What is the state of the MPI port? Does the alpha port work sufficiently well. One potential problem I can see is that I'm not sure gcc is avaliable on the T3E and I'm not sure how dependant ghc is upon the various GNU C extensions.

There are three (at least) quite distinct approaches to putting Haskell on the T3E, and on related parallel machines. (1) Port GPH to the T3E, letting the runtime system handle the control of parallelism and communication. (2) Port ghc, and write the Haskell program in SPMD style (that is, the same executable is started on every processor in the group, just as with ordinary C+MPI). (3) Same as (2), but transform the final Haskell SPMD program to C+MPI, enabling it to be compiled and run using the standard tools. In the first two approaches, there are a lot of difficulties with getting Haskell running on the T3E. This is partly due to the Alpha processor, but there may also because difficulties due to the Cray operating system. My colleagues and I are currently working on the approaches (2) and (3) above. We are also using a Cray T3E, but for the near future we'll have to run the Haskell on clusters, since we can't generate code for the Cray. The group consists of John O'Donnell, Glasgow, jtod@dcs.gla.ac.uk Thomas Rauber, Halle, rauber@informatik.uni-halle.de Gudula R"unger, Chemnitz, ruenger@informatik.tu-chemnitz.de We are also very interested in getting a Cray port of Haskell, although we're just as interested in ghc as gph. After all, SPMD programming uses sequential programming languages, not parallel ones! Anybody making progress with an Alpha port of ghc, could you please contact us? Good luck with your project, Duncan! John

Hi all,

I'm doing an internship at Cray Inc this summer and I might get the opportunity of some computer time on a T3E machine. Now I am also a great Haskell fan and have been wondering about the possibility of getting parallel Haskell running on a real super-computer. I've read that someone is working on porting ghc's parallel features to an MPI implementation and also that someone recently got the alpha port working again.

In case you don't know a T3E is a distributed memory alpha based super-computer. It supports MPI & pthreads.

So my question is, what is the state of the art? What is the state of the MPI port? Does the alpha port work sufficiently well. One potential problem I can see is that I'm not sure gcc is avaliable on the T3E and I'm not sure how dependant ghc is upon the various GNU C extensions.

So, if I can get an account, I'll have untill the end of September to test anything anyone can give me.

You know they still program these machines in C, C++ & Fortran. Shocking! ;-)

Duncan

_______________________________________________ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list Glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users

Hi Duncan, Sounds like you've got a really nice toy out there ;-) About the MPI port of GPH: right now it's not very high on our (GPH group) priority list, but it should be fairly easy to do. Actually we already started on that but haven't had the need to wrap it up properly. As we move to other machines it will become more of an issue anyway, so it's mainly a matter of timing. As already mentioned, the more immediate step would be porting GHC to the Cray. I'd certainly be very interested to have GPH running on a Cray. So, if you're going to make an effort into that direction give me shout and I'll have go at the MPI backend again. BTW, to geat an idea about on-going implementation work check also http://www.cee.hw.ac.uk/~dsg/gph/arch-indep.html and the GPH page mentioned already. Cheers, -- Hans Wolfgang On Sat, 18 Aug 2001 17:51:30 -0500 Duncan Coutts wrote:

Hi all,

I'm doing an internship at Cray Inc this summer and I might get the opportunity of some computer time on a T3E machine. Now I am also a great Haskell fan and have been wondering about the possibility of getting parallel Haskell running on a real super-computer. I've read that someone is working on porting ghc's parallel features to an MPI implementation and also that someone recently got the alpha port working again.

In case you don't know a T3E is a distributed memory alpha based super-computer. It supports MPI & pthreads.

So my question is, what is the state of the art? What is the state of the MPI port? Does the alpha port work sufficiently well. One potential problem I can see is that I'm not sure gcc is avaliable on the T3E and I'm not sure how dependant ghc is upon the various GNU C extensions.

So, if I can get an account, I'll have untill the end of September to test anything anyone can give me.

You know they still program these machines in C, C++ & Fortran. Shocking! ;-)

Duncan

_______________________________________________ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list Glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users