Question

What’s the status of multicore programming in Haskell? What projects, tools, and libraries are available now? What experience reports have there been?

Answer 1

In the 2009-2012 period, the following things have happened:

2012:

• From 2012, the parallel Haskell status updates began appearing in the Parallel Haskell Digest.

2011:

• Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell, a tutorial. version 1.1 released by Simon Marlow
• Haskell and parallelism, mentioned in an article in the Economist magazine, Jun 2nd 2011.
• Parallel tree scans via composition, an article by Conal Elliott
• Numeric Haskell, a tutorial on parallel array programming with Repa, released
• Works has begun on extending GHC eventlog and Threadscope to support multi-process or distributed Haskell systems
• Parallel Haskell Digest: Edition 2.
• The par-monad package and a monad for deterministic parallelism, Simon Marlow — more control over pure parallelism than strategies/par/pseq.
• Cloud Haskell: Erlang-style message passing between distributed Haskell nodes.
• Parallel Haskell: Embracing Diversity, a talk by SPJ.
• Real time edge detection in parallel Haskell
• Parallel Haskell Digest: news on parallel Haskell
• Composable parallel scanning
• Haskell-MPI is released

2010:

• Parallel futures for Haskell, in GHC.
• The Orc language, for concurrent job scheduling and scripting, was released.
• A new scalable thread event manager was merged into GHC.
• An improved approach to parallel sparks and strategies was developed.
• The Nikola EDSL for embedding GPU programs in Haskell was developed.
• The LLVM backend for GHC was merged in, with good performance improvements.
• ghc 6.12.x series: with parallel performance improvements
• Microsoft announces 2 years of funding to support commercial users of Parallel Haskell
• Google published their experience report on the use of Haskell (PDF)
• Intel announced the Concurrent Collections for Haskell library, including scalability numbers — scaling results for 32 and 48 cores
• Sun/Oracle bought us a machine and funded work on improving parallel performance.
• Recent updates to the status of Data Parallelism in Haskell
• MSR released ThreadScope, a graphical profiler for parallel Haskell programs
• The GHC runtime got extensively tuned for sparks and futures
• There was a good discussion on additional ways to improve parallel performance
• A collection of reading material on parallelism in Haskell to help you get started
• The Snap guys are getting 45k req/sec on their 4 way box, by using all the cores.
• Even the Erlang guys are taking notice.
• Meanwhile, there is work to make the IO manager more scalable — now with a paper on the design :: PDF.
• We’re out there teaching people too .. all .. over .. the … place.
• Starling Software wrote about their real time, multicore financial trading system in Haskell.
• Ericsson published a parallel language for DSP based on, and written in Haskell
• Galois published an implementation of Orc, a concurrent workflow language, in Haskell.
• And a new library for fast regular, parallel arrays appeared
• And Haskell continues to do well on the quad-core shootout.
• Snap, a multicore-enabled scalable web server with great performance numbers
• haskell-torrent – benchmarking a mulitcore-enabled bittorrent client in Haskell
• Haskell code was published at Supercomputing 09 — our first appearance at SC!