Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: MPI

bos:

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 10:43 AM, FFT wrote:

> Are MPI bindings still the best way of using Haskell on Beowulf > clusters? It's my feeling that the bindings stagnated, or are they > just very mature?

MPI itself hasn't changed in 14 years, so it's not exactly a moving target. (There's an MPI 2.0, but its most visible changes are not really usable.)

What's the story with distributed memory multiprocessing? Are Haskell programmers uninterested in it, or are things other than MPI used with it?

The ratio of work to payoff is unfortunately very high, so it seems to have been abandoned as a topic of fruitful research.

Though note the new paper for ICPP: "In this paper, we investigate the differences and tradeoffs imposed by two parallel Haskell dialects running on multicore machines. GpH and Eden are both constructed using the highly-optimising sequential GHC compiler, and share thread scheduling, and other elements, from a common code base. The GpH implementation investigated here uses a physically-shared heap, which should be well-suited to multicore architectures. In contrast, the Eden implementation adopts an approach that has been designed for use on distributed-memory parallel machines " http://www-fp.cs.st-and.ac.uk/~kh/mainICPP09.pdf -- Don